I think Higher Ed efficacy and Higher Ed financing are two separate issues. The system is broken, that does not mean that the system should be abolished. Grante

I think Higher Ed efficacy and Higher Ed financing are two separate issues. The system is broken, that does not mean that the system should be abolished. Granted there is a high level of student debt: http://projectonstudentdebt.org/ http://projectonstudentdebt.org/ But that does not mean that education in and of itself structured in curricula and colleges is actually a bad thing. Even with subsidies, education is quite a huge financial challenge for most people. And increasing privatisation of education will only lead to more student debt, almost to the point where the opportunity cost is too high to go to college. That is fine for the genius 1-2% of the USA but for the rest of the US the structure does not really create knowledge based human capital so needed to be competitive in the current global landscape The financing of education brings about a core philosophical issue, which is, is education a public or private good. In most European countries, it is considered a public good, and as such the state's responsibility. As such student debt issues are almost marginal in these countries. However, on the other hand, education and research quality in these universities is really low, as evidenced by rankings: http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp (I know rankings are debatable but this is the only worldwide global ranking system so lets just use it as a proxy for approximating how good a university is). I also know that due to huge amounts of student loans subsidized through private lenders, the whole education financial system came to an absolute halt in 2008, whereby lenders could not lend to eligible students to go to college. This is due to the fact that education loans are also packaged into securities and sold to investors. They are also some of the highest performing loans. The US government mainly guarantees these loans, but in 2008 had to actually inject money to get loan market flowing again. So the question is, is the university just a place to teach, or somewhere we advance humanity through sometimes isoteric research that may become relevant 20 years from now. The US system has betted on the latter of these two options for the past 30 years or so. The University system in the US is more of a business than a place of education. The increased privitisation of education has thus lead us to this place. Does it make sense to privatise it more given the current situation? In my opinion, probably not. As for people calling for the Khan Academy Model, please look at what they are doing recently: they have partnered up with the Los Altos School district to integrate their platform in classes. That increases the use of tech in education, but it does not necessarily entirely change the way education is imbibed to children. Same with Knewton, which works with universities.