If tomorrow the government decided that every university would have to fund itself on half its current budget would universities cease to exist or would they just be different.

I'd say the latter. I'd agree they're necessary to how a college functions today, but not necessary to what we think of as the core functions that make a university a university.

Stop modelling universities, national education and research systems on profit-seeking businesses.

Businesses already cover that niche; it's entirely unhelpful for universities to exist with a profit-making premise.

That would probably work if the system was designed that way decades ago. But we’re already in a situation where “free money” is driving tuition costs sky-high. Taking the next step and just having the government cut a blank check for “operating expenses” to every university will just kick the whole thing into overdrive.

If universities in the US were responsible and could a) keep expenses under control and b) not cry like little children when whenever the state demands some belt-tightening, it could work. But that’s not the world we live in. Universities just keep spending more and more and keep hiring more and more administrators.

My favorite experience with this was when I was in school many years ago at a state university. The state government said that their share of the funding was decreasing by 2% the next year (FYI, state universities are funded by state governments to some degree, it’s not all tuition). Two freaking percent! Basically asking the school to cut back to where they were two or three years ago. Sounds like a relatively reasonable ask, don’t you think?

Oh, you should have seen the wailing and gnashing of teeth that generated. The school was claiming that there wasn’t any fat in their budget (ha), and immediately proposed cutting like 10% of all class sections in math, science, art, etc. Then they riled up the students enough to have them march to the capitol and demand the cuts be rolled back (to be fair though, doesn’t take much to get students to get interested in joining a protest).

Anyway, my point is that US universities only know grow, grow, grow and to top it off they all have a fetish for turning campuses into lavish, over-the-top affairs. Getting them to cut back on anything is next to impossible, and giving them a blank check to be paid for by taxpayers in perpetuity would be a disaster.

If taxpayers only agree to foot a much smaller bill, universities will be forced to cut all the frivolous stuff and get serious about education. I'm all for taxpayer-funded college but not at the prices these colleges charge at present. You don't see college football and all the other non-educational nonsense in Germany (using that because it's an example of a country with a free college system). "Free" college should pay only for classrooms and labs, professors and TAs - no dorms, meal plans, overpriced textbooks, sports or extra-curricular activities (unless paid for by students or donors), huge admin staff and the rest.

Let me try to answer this seriously: So, the problem with your idea is that Universities are not just workshops but they are also places where research is done, where people work day in day out cranking out experiments for a pittance. If you want to optimize for a single cost function: Money, you will find that these people lose the training that got them into science on the first place. They sure as hell wouldn't go into research because the pay for Grad. Student or a Professor sucks. Also, all we would be trying to mint out in this case would be business men and lawyers. Guess what? Tech does not pay as well as you would think it would.

Also, there is a special place for classrooms and Universities irrespective of this "free distribution of information" which AFAIK has been existing since the 16th century (books): Mentorship. One of the greatest experiences that going to a world class school can give you is the ability to interact with people who have significantly shit tons of experience than you, have the wisdom and depth of knowledge in the subject.

Public (and private, for that matter) universities rely on federal funding for lots of things; make public research funding available only to non-tuition universities, eliminate federal grants and loans to students that help pay tuition and replace them with, say, enrollment based grants directly to tuition-free institutions, and you'll be left with tuition-free institutions and not much else.

That would be a different logic.

For every good private college I know of (and almost every good public school) prices are free or enormously close to so for people in the bottom quarter of incomes. Making it free for everyone might change the psychology, but not the reality for lower-income people today.

Only a single payer system has the leverage to force the universities to decouple their cruft from their core educational expenses. And you're right! College tuition would probably be near-negligible if the cruft was removed, but my take at that point is why not just make it free, then?

The irony is we essentially already have this single payer system. Every college and university is dependent on federal financing for tuition. The federal government simply needs to use the power it already possesses. It's a lot like the federal government's refusal to negotiate drug prices, a wasted opportunity.

As if that would happen! The "unproductive" courses (aka everything but STEM) will all be eliminated as there isn't money for them. Society will lose as a result. Fund everything by taxpayers instead like Europe does.

Because universities are increasingly operating like businesses, using technology transfer offices to bring in revenue and using graduate students to cut labor costs.

I think the last thing any part of the higher education industry -- for-profit or not -- needs is more subsidies. If we want them to cost less, we need to take money out of them, not dump more money in.

When I refer to cost, I mean total cost, not just the bill the university sends the student. The only thing worse than a bigger bill for a student enrolled at the university is a bigger bill for citizens who choose to not even attend university.

Some majors are actually unproductive and a waste of both the student's and taxpayer's money, and should not be subsidized.

But many humanities that often get binned this way are actually civically productive, and they're only economically unproductive because of significant market failure. The benefits to society aren't priced properly. Such majors, and that is the social sciences, should arguably be subsidized by the government, because they are technically public goods.

What the last few years has taught us is how much damage an electorate can do who isn't educated. If they don't understand anything about economic systems, political systems, sociology, history, psychology, then their mind can be taken over too easily by propaganda, which can have catastrophic consequences, all the way up to the death of democracy.

Have lab space then, have the government pay for it and schedule times for people who want to use it. Should not be limited to a university's chosen student body; it should be open to anyone that wants to learn.

You get much more than that and it gets superfluous. US universities are superfluous to the point of wastefulness.

I still say defund them and let them figure it out or shut down. But yes, I understand why this sounds extreme, particularly if you don't share my views of college being a super shit deal for most people (and universities--peddling such shit deals and responding to criticism with moral indignation--are no better than timeshare salesmen).

Sure, but we tried that, and tuitions are sky high and everyone is in tons of debt, right? Cutting all public funding may be extreme, but something obviously needs to change.

That's a pretty steadfast assertion. It's untrue, and we know that because higher education used to be affordable without a single payer system.

> The irony is we essentially already have this single payer system.

I'm not sure this is ironic so much as symptomatic. Blank checks lead to waste. Students on the hook for blank checks lead to what we have now.

> why not just make it free, then?

I can think of a couple of reasons. Nothing is free in this world, for one, and beyond that, I don't want to live in a world where I have to spend another 4 years of my life in school just to get a job because it's free and therefore expected of everyone. Those are pretty big reasons why not.

I strongly disagree. Let universities be universities. The point of a university is to develop your mind, not train for a job. There's no reason we cannot have a parallel vocational system which teaches people practical skills. Let the market decide which one better serves students.

Absolutely.

The problem is our university system as it stands is now really structured for profitability. The system was originally designed to cater to wealthy students and when public universities came to be, they kept the same model, and used tax subsidies to maintain it.

An effective for-profit education system would look nothing like our current university system. But a higher education system that doesn't match our current system isn't useful for students because the majority of them are looking for degrees, not necessarily an education.

Theoretically there's nothing wrong with for-profit schools, but the current educational climate prevent them from working. For now, for-profit education really only has a place in domains that can be taught adequately in less than a year and where the student's outcome can be readily assessed.

Most universities are the supporters of the existing government structure, so it seems to be a mutually beneficial relationship.