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Comment by nazgulnarsil | Hacker News Reader

Universities don't charge enough as evident from the fact that there are an order of magnitude more applicants than spaces at many of them.

The more they raise the prices for those willing to pay the more money they'll have to subsidize brilliant students who can't.

"normal" people should be studying practical skills. It's a product of our egalitarian mindset that we regarded the status of research institutions as everyone's right, and then used subsidies and legislation until the elite institutions were so watered down that their degrees became a joke.

You can't give away status, status will just flee and look for darker corners to hide in.

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"Universities don't charge enough as evident from the fact that there are an order of magnitude more applicants than spaces at many of them."

However, people who apply to universities in this class normally apply to many of them. Granted, some of them also get into many of them, but usually not all or most.

Same as getting 100s of resumes for a job posting. Just because you only hire 1 person for the position does not necessarily mean that you hire only from the best 1 percent.

> Universities don't charge enough [...] there are an order of magnitude more applicants than spaces at many of them.

And that's bad?! What about public schools―free tuition!

Universities―all education and knowledge―should be free. It's unfortunate teachers and teaching materials are in short supply, and hence we have to afford these to only those most "willing", but stratifying education by cost is a very poor method.

Look at the UK. Some institutions can now charge GBP 27,000 for a degree―which may or may not be of any use!―which students will repay the rest of their lives.

Some institutions can now charge GBP 27,000 for a degree―which may or may not be of any use!―which students will repay the rest of their lives.

Twenty-seven thousand pounds, in the scheme of things, is chickenfeed. It's certainly much less than the opportunity cost of going to university for four years.

Students need to take responsibility for their own education. You've got four years, hundreds of different lecture courses open to you, and a five million book library -- it's a huge opportunity to educate yourself, but it's up to you to actually extract education from it. Many students will acquire knowledge which will be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, or even millions, over the course of their degrees. If you haven't extracted a mere twenty-seven thousand pounds' worth, that's your own damn fault.

People who complain about not getting their money's worth out of university education are like people who go to Disneyland, sit on a bench near the entrance all day, and complain that it wasn't worth the money.

UK degrees work differently to US degrees. You're usually studying a fixed, single-subject program as opposed to a program with a 'major' and a wide range of 'minor' subjects, and you're studying for three years, not four.

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