But the reason interest-bearing loans were considered immoral for so long, and the reason that nearly every other kind of loan can be discharged through bankruptcy, is that it is too dangerous to allow anyone to offer such a loan. There's nothing magical about student loans that somehow makes them safe, and no amount of training will change that.

> we could train students to be much better at evaluating such a bet

Maybe... but we could definitely alter the nature of risk involved.

Why not reduce cost of tuition (e.g. <$1K/semester), while raising the bar on academic rigor as a means of controlling demand?

This is probably what's going to happen, but only if we take a LOT of human labor out of it. Either that, or accept that every class will be huge (200-500 students) with minimal attention given to students, no office hours, and low-paid labor doing all the grunt work (grading, answering questions)

I see a lot of parallels to medicine here. Both are highly regulated and seen as a "right" we ought to fund. Maybe, but until we achieve greater labor leverage (made even harder by professional credentialing in medicine), there just won't be a way to drive costs down much, so we're stuck with what we have.

College at $60k a semester while an adjunct earns $28k a year and somehow this doesn't result in a 1:1 student:teacher ratio means someone's skimming off a ton of money.

Skimming or cross-subsidizing?

Part of the problem with universities IMO is the accounting for revenue<->expenses isn't at all straightforward. Athletics generate a ton more money than they cost, most people seem fine with that. Research generates no revenue but costs a ton, for some hard-to-quantify but (hopefully?) real benefit to society at large. Tuition is nominally for teaching, which is a big cost center for a university. And, at least in the US, all the costs are split between the national government, the state government (who has the pleasure of educating people who may not live in that state long-term?) and tuition, and various donors and grants.

A system ripe for disruption, if ever there was one.

I have no idea why anyone would say "research generates no revenues" when most universities have systems to spin out viable research and profit from it. Universities quite literally profit financially from patented research funded by taxpayers. The government gets no direct return on this, and the usual argument is that it increases economic activity and raises the tax take - which may be true, but it's still a uniquely privileged position.

But most universities are more about property speculation and bequest farming than they are about education or R&D.

The system is entirely corporatised and often predatory. Professors are only as valuable as the grant income they generate, adjuncts are gig economy labour, students are a barely-tolerated annoyance, and property speculation and "administration" are considered the central mission.

Exactly, why are young students footing a disproportionate load for “society-benefiting research” as part of their tuition? And paying interest for it. That’s amazingly unfair.

For the university, research in the sciences brings in way more money than it costs, and subsidizes a lot of other things. Most professors in physics, chemistry, etc. largely pay their own salaries out of grants.

The kind of knowledge you need to evaluate this is something that is normally taught in college. What high school teaches decision making under uncertainty, along with economic history and statistics?

I mean sure we could try to teach kids this stuff, and I certainly aim to tech my kids, but it's not what's been done in the past at secondary school.

It's really too bad that high schools do not teach basic accounting, compound interest, and how the free market system works.

Things people need to know to function in our society.

There is no "free market system" here. There's an organised debt slavery racket run for the benefit of parasitic rent-seekers who operate with federal sanction.

College loans have taken point on this for the aspiring middle classes. In a very literal sense this system is the exact opposite of genuine freedom and opportunity.

In high school I took economics, precalculus (which taught exponential growth), and history (which talked about financial crises of the past). The information was taught, but the problem is that there was no class to tie this information into life practice.

How does the free market system work?

Isn't that then a gigantic failure of high school then? If there is one thing we need to prepare students for, isn't it how to start making career decisions?

If that's a goal of high school, then yes, it's a huge failing. There's also a bunch of other useful stuff they don't teach you, like cooking and how to wash your clothes. There's no coherent idea of what school is supposed to be, though. Is it a place to learn a bunch of practical skills? Or a place to read about some interesting ideas? All those things take time and money, and we end up with a school that does a bunch of different stuff with no real plan.

Our town used to have the Mechanics' Academy. A 12-week study program to learn enough math to balance, books, amortize a loan, calculate weights and measures, figure load limits. Graduates were very employable. My Mom's Grandfather was one.

Long ago demolished and turned into a Mall during Urban Renewal.