Theme: Incentives

There used to be value for the professors although that has diminished with the financialization of the university mission – likewise it appears that the quality of teaching professors has declined by the measurement of research performance rather than student life performance.

There is social value not accounted for in the material alone.

There is a concentration of talent in university setting that does not exist outside of that setting and we learn through imitation of it and measurement of other environments by that standard.

There is value in minimizing the number of inputs (distractions) – although we might argue that insulation from market forces produces worse consequences than minimization of inputs provide.

Even if there is commodity value in the material, there is unsubstitutable value in tutoring – taking responsibility for the transition in state of each individual. There is very little if any value to administration.

The relationship between Professors and students in the college system (a collection of professors offering their courses together on the open market).

LIttle if anything is learned, retained, and practiced outside of the university setting (meaning universities primarily sort not train). There is very questionable measured value of a degree other than sorting and filtering (signaling).

We could measure this by measuring first two decade performance. But the consequences for universities would be damning.

The problem of the contemporary university is largely the conflation of vocational(craft), clerical (administrative), STEM (calculative), and religious(civic) services in one institution without variations in price, and the consequential redistribution of debt between those students.

The conflation of student, research, and sport revenues at the expense of student debt only exacerbates this problem. So by and large the degree process has no empirical measurement other than filtering.

If instead, universities had to carry student debt on behalf of the student, and could collect it only over 10 years as payroll deduction, and universities had to warranty their degrees just like other purveyors of goods and services, we would end the prior privileges we granted to universities as extensions of the church, and treat them as ordinary businesses (which is how they act) that produce a product that they must involuntarily warranty shall perform in the market.

If that were the case, it is quite likely that the schools would re-parition, the costs of education would reflect lifetime returns for each discipline, and those people who pay the high cost of ‘university’ (calculative) degrees would return to statistical levels wherein only 10% of a normally distributed ethnically european population would enter university – because that is approximately the maximum percentage of the population that is capable of university level (calculative) work.

Most importantly, the funding of marxist and postmodern propaganda produced by under sanction of the academy-as-replacment-for-church would be eliminated. etc. etc.