So you don't want the top scientists, engineers and thinkers training the next generation? And you don't want popular sexy things subsidizing inventing new things that haven't had time to be popular yet?

How do you think we arrived at the current model?

What stops a college from not offering a sports team?

Nothing! There are also a lot of vocational schools.

Maybe we'll see some unbundling but I doubt it.

Who wants to learn Circuit Design from a college with a lab from the 1980s? As opposed to one publishing research papers on the newest techniques?

What better way to get Alumina donations than giving them a tribal ties to the institution with sports teams?

How do you make sure the nepotism families stay in control of the grander scheme

Most of ANY discussion with US Americans is at most 2 skips from : "yeah, but who's going to pay for it/ yeah, but how much money is that going to make you".

We're a lost bunch.

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It starts out that way, but moves more into the viewpoint that the American university system is several things bundled together that are coming apart and AI is only part of the issue (others are just the Internet in general creating a parallel social life and the current American government deciding that research funding is a political tool rather than a value in itself.) Basically university traditionally is where young people figure out their interests and people they want to hang out with are, the education and credentialing system they need to get a job, and independent of these undergraduates, a research institution bringing in millions of dollars of grant money a year per university, which people not professors or grad students only vaguely aware exist.

>...The US would have no problem affording that education, if it just considered taxing the richest members of its society a reasonable amount, as it did in the past.

The USA has about the most progressive taxes of all the OECD countries. In the United States high earners pay high taxes and pay a heavy share of the federal tax burden, while lower- and middle-income households pay comparatively little in direct federal income tax and there is no national consumption tax. In other OECD countries the high earners pay high taxes, but the poor and middle classes also pay high taxes including a 15%–25% national sales taxes (VAT). The US would have no problem affording that education if its tax policy was similar to all the other OECD countries, but that is not a choice voters have made.

https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...

While maximum US tax rates have varied significantly, the amount of money collected as a fraction of GDP has been remarkably stable.

I mention both rates and "fraction of GDP" because rates can't be spent.

The maximum take is around 20%, regardless of rates, and we're there now, and have been for decades.

I'd like those insecure folks downvoting this to mention if they are part of this grift and work for one of these "legacy institutions" or if they're just angry about spending a degree that isn't worth it's equivalent usefulness as toilet paper after adjusting for outcomes vs. spend.