Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
The real conversation IMO involves finding a way to compel academia to run itself like a real business. Currently, it has no skin in the game. However poorly it polices costs, however profligately it spends, a new pipeline of student loan money refills its coffers each fall. Clawbacks are necessary, as is taxation of endowments, at a minimum, but they're just a small fraction of a much broader necessary overhaul of higher education.
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This is nonsense. There are (small) parts of academia that run themselves like real businesses. They don't do academia well. The reasons for this should be pretty obvious. Academic institutions are not profit-maximizing enterprises. They create public goods with obvious value, but value which mostly cannot be captured and monetized by the institutions. Asking them to run themselves like real businesses is just as misguided as asking that government run itself like a real business (and note that the people who say this are also the people who don't ever want the government to raise its prices to them, something businesses do all the time, which is a tell that the ask is a performative gesture, not a serious idea).
IMO, the problem with much of academia is that they have been increasingly captured by the administrations, which expands its own share of their resources without contributing much of anything to education and research.
eta: Top schools should be trying to figure out how to leverage technology to educate more students, but instead they are content to maintain their current size, since that helps maintain their prestige -- a way in which the schools diminish their mission for the benefit of the people working there. You can argue that a school like Harvard is essentially an endowment fund with an educational sideline, and its board can certainly decide to do that if it wants to, but it's particularly irritating to see state schools engaging in this conduct.
