A major factor is the Baumol Effect - we can't easily apply productivity increases to labor-intensive tasks like education. I mean, robotics and better tools h

A major factor is the Baumol Effect - we can't easily apply productivity increases to labor-intensive tasks like education. I mean, robotics and better tools has greatly increased blue-collar productivity, and computers and networking has greatly increased white-collar productivity, but at the end of the day, teachers can still only teach the same number of students and doctors can only see so many patients per day. That's not to say that there have been no productivity gains (laparoscopic surgery, for instance), but that those gains have lagged behind most other industries. The best way to control costs in industries like education and medicine is to find ways to create productivity gains. If we could either make it easier for teachers to impart knowledge to more kids simultaneously or make the imparted knowledge stick better, we'd be easily able to solve this problem.