This is a great little insight, well put, and in fact you are understating the scope of the problem. The impact of this issue is, if anything, greater on the c

This is a great little insight, well put, and in fact you are understating the scope of the problem. The impact of this issue is, if anything, greater on the cost of research than it is on the cost of an education. A major academic institution is the single most expensive place you could do research - because everything costs much more than it should, the headcount on any project is stratospheric, and everything moves so slowly that you pay much more for each "head" than you ought to. That has downstream affects that kneecap every industry reliant on academic research, from industrial and military competitiveness to medicine. It's also why there has been interest for decades, and seems to be increasing interest now, in private research lab investment from large philanthropists - it is legitimately cheaper and faster to pull a Paul Allen and stand up a new research lab from scratch than it is to get the same research done through traditional academic means. Scott Galloway (who I know is somebody everybody has an opinion about now) has scoped this problem really well, though I've been much less impressed experientially with his solution (Section4). You're spot-on - if we optimized for creating productive members of society (bullet #2) and preparing individuals for financial independence and productivity (bullet #1) individually - or even just ceded #2 temporarily (which is a role, arguably, existing colleges are failing at anyway) and optimized toward #1 - it could be done much more cheaply than it is being done today. NOT through any kind of high-minded shift in how education is done, as education, in the sense of a teacher-in-a-classroom-teaching-students-supported-by-TAs, is not broken, and has worked for centuries. But college today is like a really bad cable bill, where the vast majority of users are paying for one thing (ESPN), but have their cost burdened by 90% of the package being a required purchase that they don't want. (All the other channels) Other dimensions of the problem better support disruption, but most directly, your point would be well addressed by colleges simply reducing overservice. Of course, that implies gargantuan changes to the structure of these institutions, which will be wildly uncomfortable for a lot of individuals who are currently supported by them.