Why do you think teaching at a university is better than working at Costco? How do you decide the optimal number of university teachers vs. optimal number of Costco employees without the market test?
I don't have any emotional attachment to university teachers anymore than I have emotional attachment to buggy whip makers. Maybe a lot of the knowledge a university education provided can be obtained by moving to a major city and watching various Youtube documentaries for 4 years, augmented with debating people in Hacker News comments.
If your goal in life is to be happy, healthy, and fulfilled in purpose, hasn't universal university education been a recent phenomena, not required to fulfil one's life goals? Perhaps university life and its requisite bureaucracy is an aberration, not a requirement for human flourishing.
The professors I know are experts in their small domain (and most of them are really smart, but this is not my point here). They know all the nitty details, I am always amazed by their wide knowledge in discussions. I think for a society it is easily worth it to pay people to dig so deep into their field of interest and the market is not the right mechanism to enable that.
I also think Youtube is nice to get started, but I found it insufficient for graduate level material.
I don't have any emotional attachment to university teachers anymore than I have emotional attachment to buggy whip makers. Maybe a lot of the knowledge a university education provided can be obtained by moving to a major city and watching various Youtube documentaries for 4 years, augmented with debating people in Hacker News comments.
If your goal in life is to be happy, healthy, and fulfilled in purpose, hasn't universal university education been a recent phenomena, not required to fulfil one's life goals? Perhaps university life and its requisite bureaucracy is an aberration, not a requirement for human flourishing.