[brazzy]

It seems to me that the bizarre excesses of the "education bubble" are the direct result of a free market in education and prove that it's a bad idea.

Education is not something where there should ever be an attempt to capture the consumer surplus.

[hackinthebochs]

The education bubble is in fact caused by the opposite of the free market. On one end you have government subsidies and no corresponding price controls which inflate demand and drive up prices. On the other end you have no negative feedback mechanism in terms of shedding the debt in bankruptcy for degrees that turn out to be worthless.

There is no downside for institutions to continually inflate prices, so they do. Incentives run the world.