[pnathan]

That's not very constructive, but let me engage in a metacomment.

Good ideas are born out of bad ideas sharpened and the bad bits thrown out over time. I am not a professional administrator in college, but I did spend time at a variety of institutions of higher ed and wound up with a Master's degree and experience teaching, researching, and studenting. I think my thoughts are not entirely worthless. But they are not taking into account the full picture, as I've not been a professor, support staff, or an admin. However, if experienced people from each side of the University structure contribute their ideas, perhaps out of the pool of undercooked ingredients will be the parts for some really great pieces; and those ideas would be truly awsome.

So. Yes. My idea is undercooked. But maybe it can help contribute to a better solution. Maybe. :-)

[enraged_camel]

Your own comment was not very constructive. You listed three existing proposed solutions, and dismissed them prematurely with minimal explanation. For example, you said free college for everyone would be taken advantage of, yet it seems to have worked wonderfully for Europe. The second solution you listed, you also dismissed, saying it is the "wrong way to go about it" but did not explain why. And for the third solution you said forcing schools to cut overhead would require administrators to fire themselves, which is not true. But you dismissed it too.

The rest of your comment assumes that we can actually find a solution to the mess that is US college education - or education in general. That is unlikely to happen. Despite the fact that most people here on HN are very smart, we are overwhelmingly technologists and don't know much about the problem domain (education) to begin with. We may have participated in it as clients (i.e. students) but that's the extent of most people's exposure to it. This is why everyone has different opinions on what the root cause of the issues are. Debating them might be interesting, but a solution is unlikely to emerge in a medium like this due to the sheer complexity of the problem.