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Comment by semiquaver | Hacker News Reader

It seems that the entire higher education space is in dire need of some creative destruction. College expenses have been subject to cost disease for years and a reckoning is long due. I’m not sure if demographic change will produce this reckoning but something has to.

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You just have to fire 80% of the administration, kill all of the "programs" which are trying to do this or that, and focus on A) providing the basic resources for academics to study and B) providing the basic resources for teaching.

Universities need to do very much less that isn't directly related to research or teaching and stop pretending the lead administrator of a university is an important position. The president of a university should have the pay and prestige that goes along with administering the parking garage and cafeteria and have few responsibilities or accolades beyond that.

But then how will the NFL run it's free feeder and athlete development program?

How will Disney get to profit off of selling college athletes as an entertainment product?

If college is accessible to even the poorest Americans, how will we maintain the claim that they are bastions of liberal brainwashing against millions of conservative people getting reasonable educations in basic things like "Political Science" that don't actually force them to become communists at all?

Who will ensure that only those who "Deserve" it can afford to get a degree through byzantine FAFSA workflows and departments? Who will ensure that being middle class means you have to pay out of pocket instead of getting a couple thousand dollars?!

College football is very profitable. What will go away is all the other sports.

If you do this, you will destroy half of the top 20 hospital systems in the US, as they are run by Universities. Now maybe separating medical systems from universities is a good idea, but it's not simple by any means.

Government data on university expenditures show that at a broad level the increases in instructional and student-related expenditures are modest. Much of the increase is in the aforementioned medical systems, and in the Graduate and Faculty research enterprises:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_334.10.a...

Those are under the umbrella of research and teaching no?

I wouldn't think so. Hospitals do some teaching and research, but they also administer huge amounts of prescription drugs, physician salaries (both teaching and non-teaching), durable medical equipment, supplies, marketing, home health services, etc.

"It seems that the entire higher education space is in dire need of some creative destruction."

There is a substantial collection of things that share this need.

There are only two businesses ChatGPT has really disrupted: Chegg and customer service.

There's disruption but not the good kind. The reckoning is cheating not demographics.

My most effective professors gave us the answers to the work we were expected to do. It was a much more effective way to learn than doing work and getting feedback to whether or not it was correct weeks later. Organizing academic work in such a way that "cheating" is even a concept is silly. You're there to learn, if you want to pretend that you learned I guess good for you but we need to just get over the fact that people can make it look like they did something when they didn't.

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