It's complete bullshit
You can now comfortably afford to hire a staff of PhD students to tutor you 1on1 in every subject you want to learn more cheaply than going to a university. So where the FUCK is all that money going?
You can now comfortably afford to hire a staff of PhD students to tutor you 1on1 in every subject you want to learn more cheaply than going to a university. So where the FUCK is all that money going?
Please be aware that higher education is a massive dumping ground for the lowest-performing segment of the politically-connected managerial class, who are too cowardly and lazy to run for elected office, and too stupid and impulsive to make it in industry.
Academia is perfect, for them: a gigantic stage for demonstrating moral superiority and hiring friends, with no fundamentals that matter at all.
>That pretty much answers the question of why we don’t have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declini...
And of course this becomes worse if you're using other people's money. If you're throwing your own money at an impossible task, you'll run out (or your investors will run out). If you're collecting the money as taxes and then throwing it at the impossible task, you can waste as much of it as you want. If you're telling people "do this impossible task or I shoot you", you end up doing a lot of shooting and not much teleporting.
Oh and another 14% gets invested - buildings and securities.
Often the old buildings were not that old at all! They just no longer project the kind of prestige the university thinks is needed to persuade students to enroll.
It was either a joke or schools and universities have an incredibly tight grip on their market.
Picture what illusive product one can make in those settings. You can have insane prices, the only limit would be what people can afford. The maximum price then becomes maximum debt. While at the same time you can rush out a product that is complete crap, borderline believable but only for the ones who make the relevant decisions.
I see a docu one time about a semi-commercial chinese education formula. Each subject is cut up into tiny modules, seemingly as tiny as possible. One tiny booklet and 1-2 classes. You remember dependency hell? That was it, on steroids. The cert for the module, combined with others did give you access to additional modules and the bundle of coupons eventually turned into a more milestone like diploma but this wasn't the interesting part! You could take a different path after doing a module and become an instructor assistant, become an instructor and then become an instructor assistant instructor! If someone discovered a hard question there was always additional gray matter above you in the food chain.
They had people who could barely bang 2 rocks together TEACHING how to bang the rocks as if the universe revolved around it.
Others build a parkour tightly packed with modules one after the other. If they failed anything they got stuck eventually as you cant do C without A+B
The early adopters of the MLM program had their hands full assisting the teachers teachers teachers. It looked humbling to say the least.
edit: I forgot the part where one could start a business and continue to enjoy the advice from those you paid to teach you and the job offers listing specifically what modules were required.
Some of the administrative bloat is for regulatory compliance, but most of it seems to be driven by the expansionist tendencies of bureaucratic organizations.
Oddly enough there actually seems to be less administrative/secretarial support for faculty, while student mental health remains a problem that doesn't seem to be addressed adequately.