Comment by disambiguation

> The salt in the wounds is that universities are flush with cash, yet its spent on anything and everything except for the welfare of the students.

Maybe the elites. State schools and small colleges are not flush with cash and many have been shuttered or severely downsized recently. Though they could still spend their limited funds better.

It feels to me like part of the disconnect is that education and job training isn't necessarily the same thing. For many majors improving economic outcomes is not the core mission.

> but on behalf of the common folk universities have been failing their core mission - to provide the people with a quality education.

I see this a lot and it’s a concerningly reductive argument. Say what you want about a lot of colleges but when you talk about that mission you are talking about public colleges. Most have far lower endowments and most are very reasonably priced or free for instate students.

Georgia and California are great examples of this. The support for these institutions that used to come from states has gone down enormously while the cost of goods has gone up.

As a result it is not unreasonable to me for them to charge out of state and international students much much more. Georgia shouldn’t be subsidizing the college degrees of Alabamans, nor California of Arizonans.

All that to say the economics here are far more variable than people give much thought to and it’s easy to point at headline grabbing numbers that don’t reflect reality.

Schools rent the ones pressuring kids…their parents and society is.

Have they been failing at their core missions, though? You say there has been an inversion/disconnect between cost of tuition and economic outcomes, but looking at the data doesn't back that. At least, I have yet to see anything that supports an inversion. Diminished returns maybe. Certainly a good case to not take out loans to get into school if you don't have a reasonable chance of graduation.

But that is true of everything we do loans for, nowadays. The amount of consumer debt that people contort themselves into justifying is insane. If you want to use that as evidence that grade schools are failing in education, I can largely agree with you.

Their core mission is to provide society with a endless surplus of food and energy from air