Part of it is just a shift in mentality. When we viewed education as a net benefit to society that society was willing to pay for, there was a natural downward pressure on the cost of education since the public was shouldering most of the burden to educate people. Once we shifted to the mindset where an education was valued based on how much extra money the recipient could make during his/her lifetime, that downward pressure went away and market forces took over. Suddenly it was acceptable to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for an education because that shift in mentality meant that people would pay that much.

The result is our current educational system, where costs have ballooned and administrative and facilities costs dwarf the spending on actual education. I wish I could remember where I read it, but there was an excellent article that traced beginning of our rapidly increasing education costs to the era when Reagan was governor of California and he pushed that shift in mindset. The whole system and all the problems we're experiencing suddenly make perfect sense when you view it from that perspective.

I'd personally like to see a hybrid approach. We should identify a core curriculum that leads to a well-educated populace. Things like statistics and formal logic that make it much harder to manipulate people the way that our current politicians and media do. It should be free to study that curriculum. Anything beyond that, including vocational training, could be market based and lenders should consider the likelihood of repayment when loaning money for tuition.