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Those are good points. What I was trying to put across by invoking "market dynamics" was that the state of the current market as it exists is driving bloat rather than the capriciousness of individual administrators. You're right that the market is not in an unrestrained state.

Agree! I work in K-12 and we've seen the same exact thing over the past few years. The emphasis on top-down control and quality measures have done a ton of good for consultants, advisors, data analysts, and IT depts - and a ton of nothing for students.

My favorite part of this whole debacle is seeing districts and schools using administrative bloat to their advantage when creatively reporting "Student:Staff" ratios.

I can't believe folks would even accept a metric like "student:staff" rather than class-size. I would have no care about the ratio of myKid:janitor for example, no offense to janitors intended.

The one you are looking for is student/faculty ratio. They used to promote that until they realized they could puff up their ratio by including staff as well. Similar to the unemployment rate excluding people who can work but have stopped looking.

SO much BS in the US.

Regarding academia, what countries do you suggest and why?

Germany, With some modifications: not completely free but very low tuition costs with adjusted repayment plans based on the income upon graduation.

Why? Because most folks dont really want to start their professional lives with massive debt right out of the gates.

I don't have any experience with academia outside the US. For people wanting to go to college in the US, I would recommend Junior College for the first two years, then University for the second, and select in-state college that is close to where you already live.

I wish I had gone to JC my first two years. I was so thrilled with being out from under my parent's supervision that I goofed off too much in my first two years. JC is a little more forgiving, and in my experience, didn't have those huge lecture hall entry level course that spit out so many new students.

In state because it's much cheaper.

Also, unless you are already wealthy or have a family job waiting, get a degree based on what you like, but it must be fairly lucrative. Accounting, Finance, IT, CS, Engineering, etc. Stay away from art degrees and English majors. The subjects are fascinating, but it's awful hard to land a good job in those majors. Also, being a professor is very difficult to get into and getting tenure is even harder, so you probably want to skip that route.

These are just metrics - often used for specialized or internal calculations. The unemployment rate (excl. discouraged workers) is primarily an Econ metric that the press has fixated on. There's plenty of other metrics out there, but mass media doesn't care enough to dig deep enough to find out.

>Students who now go to schools who do nothing for them and have no chance of paying their loans -- or spend most of their adult life trying to -- would be dissuaded from making that incorrect financial choice.

The feedback loop for that is incredibly slow and incomplete. University reputations move on the order of decades, and only a handful of universities enter the public consciousness by way of reputation. Most students also don't have the freedom of choice to go to any university of their choosing (or everyone would go to the 'best' one). 'invisible hand' arguments just don't work on this one.

I'm baffled by adults that grew up with computers yet seem to be unable to google a school for their reputation and the job prospects for graduates.

Back in my day, pre-internet, every high school guidance counselor had catalogs that compared schools, so did public libraries, and magazines like US News & World Report would annually publish rankings.

US News still publishes rankings, that's why every college has three Vice-Chancellors of Gaming the US News Rankings.

(See Cathy O'Neil's "Weapons of Math Destruction", where she blames US News rankings specifically for the bloat of universities and the overuse of adjuncts.)

Gaming a magazine is one thing, but I'm not sure how schools are able to game google to hide "graduating" masses of unhappy, unqualified, and unemployable students.

I'm not sure people ARE ignorant of that. When I was in school people would make jokes about what they'd do after college "I'm an English major, so probably wait tables. Ha ha ha!" And I always wanted to say "That's literally true."

My perception is that people, especially at that age, feel pressure to follow a track, and going to college is expected, and some majors are easy, and so they follow the path of least resistance.

I love going off a tangent so here's so wthing previously on hn

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8777899

When there's disconnect between the happytalk of the university and the employability/performance of students the students will blame themselves for not working hard enough. They will not blame the university for having an outdated curriculum or incompetent faculty.

My institution offers a seven-year combined BS/MD program. Graduate on time, get an MCAT score above the national mean and a decent GPA, and after 3 years you are automatically admitted to the institution's medical school. One requirement for admission into this program is an ACT score >= 32. Of this cohort, only 60 % made the cut.

60 % is low. This can't all be students that transferred out because the undergrad instruction is too awful or are otherwise incapable. I would put the blame squarely on the irrelevant curriculum and also would not hire anyone from that place because the level of instruction is just too low.

Traditionally, a university's function was to educate students, not to make them employable. I spent years in graduate school learning the obscure details of my discipline, but I didn't take classes on how to get 22 year olds jobs.

Automatic medical school admission? Can you tell me what this institution is or where I could find a list of universities with similar programs?

You just ask Google for things like "seven-year bs/md program" or "seven-year program". It's interesting to see that Google's autocomplete offers up suggestions like "seven-year program ranking". It makes sense, they are becoming popular.

Feedback loops for "Is this degree a good investment?" are slow because it can take 15 years or more between starting an undergraduate degree to reaching maximum salary (and/or fully paying off loans).

So you can only really report on how good value a course was 15 years ago - and in the intervening period, there's a good chance the academics, curriculum, price, industry and economy will have changed a great deal.

But if student loans existed in a competitive market, there would exist huge incentive for loan providers to do everything they could to really figure these things out. I completely take your point that this feedback would never be exact, but with federal student loans, the current feedback is about as worse as it could be. In a true market system, loan providers -- who would care a lot about being paid back! -- would require higher rates for schools with more dubious success, and would therefore tighten the feedback loop between school quality and student enrollment.

Right, but in a market, if loans allowed to fluctuate with propensity of it being paid off, the student who'd be about to enroll in a good-for-nothing school would be facing far, far higher rates... which would tighten that feedback loop.

It not being an ideal free market doesn't change the fact that it's a market and it has market-ish dynamics.