I always thought the tech revolution would mean cutting of traditional middlemen

books and libraries and radio and tv and internet will revolutionize education - people said.

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.

I don't buy that. Middlemen typically exist to solve some existing market inefficiency, or they exist through corruption and regulatory capture. The latter is a huge problem, but it's not THE problem. Ballooning administration seems to REALLY be the problem all over the place. But... Why is that?

Because there is no competition, and demand has massively outstripped supply. If you want to make money in academic management, you need to build an organization to manage and then justify a high salary to do so. And this is what happens. Huge staffs doing nothing but justifying the boss’ salary have appeared at universities over the past few decades.