> If only we were somehow able to remove the ability to peacock and ensure everyone going through the system got a good education

Good professors are rare. Good classmates are rare. Distributed education lets benefits from the former scale, albeit with degradation. There is no known way to scale access to the network of a good college experience.

Education quality varies with respect to both of the above. As a result, there is a scaling limit. As a result, there will be scarcity until the preconditions are solved or the scaling limits released.

There is a school of thought that all the value in higher education comes from signaling.

There is more value in a Princeton diploma than a Princeton education.

One solution I heard is changing the loan requirement to be a fixed price sole payment accepted with zero required additional bundling. They can have scholarships but none of this "must stay in our dorms the first year and meal plan, books must be bought from here now suddenly several thousand each" mark up smuggling opportunity bullshit. So there would be a driven for efficiency. You want federal money for education? It is accept $35K/yr per student or get bent.

There would be fine tuning in the numbers and parameters but that would kill price as a signal as a good thing as it forces either public rates or exorbitant private school which thinks they can actually make more without the massive prime consumer pool.