Doctors should not operate on themselves, lawyers should not represent themselves, and academics who are totally detached from reality certainly should not diag

Doctors should not operate on themselves, lawyers should not represent themselves, and academics who are totally detached from reality certainly should not diagnose themselves. Notice the total detachment from reality in these remarks: William Bowen, who later became President of Princeton, first put some math to this in 1966. The problem is not the cost of football teams or palatial dorms; it’s a lack of productivity growth. Putting a professor in a room with 25 students cannot become more efficient every year, while almost everything else in society does. The problem is not one of scale or efficiency; it's a complete mismatch between value needed and value supplied. Academia continues to double its prices, knowing full well that they can only be paid by taxpayers while supplying its end users with a product that will never enable them to pay back those loans. And continues to churn out "communications majors" without basic communications skills while industry pines for engineers. What a scam. My alma mater continually seeks my advice on how to improve their fundraising. I tell them to forget about fundraising and provide better value. They could start by getting up off their asses, getting out into the real world, digging more than one superficial level deep, and finding out what is really needed. Lowering prices and adding sciences couldn't hurt, either.