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Comment by noelchurchill | Hacker News Reader

Then maybe universities and research centers should be separated. My tuition should be applied towards the professors who will be teaching me. I'm going there for my own personal progress. If I want to go to a university that's doing the research then I would be willing to pay the extra tuition to go there.

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Fortunately for you, these already exist. Just avoid any university that calls itself a "research university". All community colleges and many other schools (notably liberal arts colleges) fall into this non-research category.

Turns out, however, that research and teaching are complementary, so the best faculty and the most gung ho students will often be at the research universities, and that you can often learn more in a research setting than in a classroom.

That would be very hard to separate. There are very few professors who (in my experience) are professors simply because they want to teach students. The vast majority of them see teaching as simply a requirement to do research.

One of the key factors in combining the two is that you are not learning from someone who kind of studied the subject a decade or two previous like you would in high school, you're being taught by someone who is actively research the subject (or a similar subject).

University of Phoenix is open 24 hours a day, go for it.

You're probably being facetious, but I suspect that University of Phoenix and similar programs are, as an idea, higher education done right. My bet is the for-profit colleges will give establishment education a serious run for their money in coming years.

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