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It's kind of interesting that libertarian Reason Magazine feels the need to comment on this. Isn't this just Capitalism Working Great, serving the student/parent-customers who are paying the bills?

I know there's more nuance to this - you can disagree with what a firm does in a free market economy and assert it's bad for society. But it seems like, from a libertarian perspective, the focus should be on how this is bad for the university, and will reduce its signaling value to employers or something. Because if the customers want a diploma mill, and there's no self-interest downside to the university becoming a diploma mill, then in a libertarian worldview it's generally quite right and good that the university becomes a diploma mill.

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That's what some of my students believe, but is wrong in socialized education countries. Here, the government are my paymasters. They pay me to train students to become engineers. And they set the bar. And students need to reach that bar.

So, we are not in-hoc to the students. They are not consumers paying for a service. They are in a privileged position that they are receiving an education, an investment, and it is their responsibility to reach the desired standard.

That said, we also have some (not that much) pressure to pass more students, as the university makes more money.

That sounds really, really nice, genuinely. In the US though, I fear we would fail just as badly on this front with fully government-funded universities. We have pervasive cultural problems and I worry the government would institutionalize them rather than acting as a bulwark against them.

In many localities, government-funded K-12 has the exact same problems exemplified by this orgo prof's firing, except the taxpayer is compelled to fund the dysfunction. The silver lining is the charter school movement, which at least sometimes allows families trapped in bad school systems to escape to a better culture, but even in the charter system there is a good amount of exploitation masquerading as education.

I think the "enlightened" libertarian view might be needed here - if your university becomes a diploma mill, it ceases to be useful to employers. Eventually, students realize it no longer provides the signaling value it once did and go elsewhere. And gossiping about the failure of standards hopefully accelerates this process.

I still remember being sent to the principal in 3rd grade when the teacher said her job wasn't to make sure we learned when asked why she didn't do anything about the learning-preventing harassment happening right in front of her, and I asked what her job was if not that.

It seems like you have a characterized and absurdist view of libertarianism. Libertarianism is primarily about maximizing individual liberty, not the ultra-capitalist, amoral view you seem to have. Libertarians aren't anarchists (ignoring the various fringe anarcho-whatevers that espouse a government type that is impossible).

It does seem like a failure mode of capitalism, but something I wonder about is if more capitalism could be used to fix this by basing the university's earnings on the student's earnings after getting their degree instead of pre-paying for education. Basically the students would owe X% of their earnings above Y salary for the first Z years to the university.

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