A good read, and I agree on your points. Like you, I worked my way through undergrad (including a period in the national guard and active army), and escaped wit

A good read, and I agree on your points. Like you, I worked my way through undergrad (including a period in the national guard and active army), and escaped with only a few thousand in debt thanks to that. Masters and PhD were free, but that's not too unusual in my area (applied math). I'm teaching one class as a part-time instructor now back at my old university (basically for beer money on top of the day job), and it's blowing my mind how much more flashy the campus is. And naturally, how ridiculously expensive it is after only 10 years. The focus on "student life" facilities strikes me as an odd set of priorities considering how long hiring and pay raise freezes for faculty seem to last. The mandatory online book thing is pretty insidious. We're required to use it by the department, and I can see how there is a kernel of a good idea there. It basically helps you run gigantic course sections while grading all homework for you, but while simultaneously killing the secondary textbook market (which is pretty evil). Worse, they are clearly implemented by the lowest bidder and break every web standard you could imagine. Basically, with increased class sizes and mandatory online content, every core course is slowly turning into a weird online hybrid class. I think this is decreasing the difference between a traditional education and a MOOC bit by bit, which is eventually going to give a lot of universities a bit of an identity and marketing crisis. Pearson, Wiley, Mcgraw-Hill et. al. are the entities that I would most like to see disappear when the college bubble pops. Free open-source community maintained textbooks seem like the obvious way forward to my software developer brain. On the bright side, I do enjoy actual lecturing. It's a lot more fun when you can do it with few or no stakes, since I don't have to rely on it for a living. I'm literally on the exact opposite of the spectrum from a tenured professor, but I weirdly feel like I have to same level of freedom.