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Comment by maverick_iceman | Hacker News Reader

Higher education is ironically one of the least regulated industries in the US. Classifying employees as contractors (adjuncts and grad students), importing cheap labor from overseas, sky-high compensation for administrators who add little value, easy loans to barely adult students without any collateral - the list goes on and on.

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Higher education breeds the thinkers that drive popular opinion -- the thought leaders and intellectual elites. The State bestows special privilege to intellectuals in government and handles academia with kid gloves. That special treatment lasts as long as academia continues to churn out elites who magnify the State in their writings and policy recommendations.

Dissenting voices are dutifully dismissed and compromised in the halls of academia's upper echelons.

Maybe that's a good thing that it's self-governing and less regulated then. Research universities contribute a ton of research and teaching to society. Can't say the same about other industries.

You're kidding right? "Other industries" have literally built pretty much everything you see around you, generated the knowledge to do it, and train millions of workers in it.

You mean after being educated at research universities for years, learning from the academic literature and textbooks, and meeting collaborators in classes? Like Google, right? Or Facebook? Or do you mean Wall Street? Or Boeing?

Or did some self-taught teenager "generate knowledge" in his spare time from scratch?

In the tech industry alone, Google and Microsoft run top-tier research arms. And before them, Bell Labs and others did at least as much as universities to advance the field.

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