In the US it is very easy to get into a university. It is not so easy to get into a good university.
> Why not just build more universities?
Because enrollment and the numbers of students who can pay are dwindling [1].
> Also why not start a private education company that probably wouldn't be eligible to issue government-accredited degrees (who but medical doctors and lawyers needs them anyway?)
The main reason anyone in the US goes to college these days is to get a degree, not to receive education related to any specific job. They want to get a degree because most employers still require a degree either for consideration or for promotion. The employers require this because they see it (fairly or unfairly) as an easy way to weed out those who would be unqualified. Any employer that would accept a non-accredited degree from a private education company that could easily just be selling certificates (which already happens anyway) probably wouldn't even care if you had a degree in the first place.
> yet would provide university-level education quality and compete the free-market way
I just don't see there being a significant market of people willing to pay full tuition for a non-accredited institution, to the extent that it could afford to hire good professors away from existing universities and be a better option for them than pursuing tenured positions elsewhere.
Compounded with the unlikelihood that students would be able to get reasonable loans to attend a school that could very well be a scam, this seems completely untenable. Students get into enough debt as it is going to accredited institutions with government loans.
> In the US it is very easy to get into a university. It is not so easy to get into a good university.
Because the academic job market is so tight, many of the professors at obscure poorly ranked universities are amazing teachers who do solid (but perhaps not famous or well promoted) research.
You should probably replace “good” in your sentence with “prestigious” or the like.
If you are the university dean or administrator who hires the professors, you maybe prefer the hot-shot professor who brings in a boatload of research grant money over the professor who gets the best teacher ratings.
The university gets a cut of the grant money and gains a bunch of reputation points for putting out cutting edge research. High teacher ratings are great, but the big universities care less about these and more about the number of Science and Nature papers a professor produces.
Unfortunately students aren't involved in hiring decisions. Everything I've ever heard suggests that faculty at prestigious universities are universally there thanks to their research credentials, not their teaching credentials. This was certainly true of the school I went to.
You know that unaccredited private universities (besides the phoney diploma mills) do exist, right?[0] The discussion shouldn't be about whether they can exist, but rather how much recognition they can garner across how broad of a spectrum of disciplines -- which goes up and down over time. I think we (as a civilization) are about to lose faith in academia, and I expect more opportunities in this space to open up, but I could be totally wrong.
> Because enrollment and the numbers of students who can pay are dwindling
> I just don't see there being a significant market of people willing to pay full tuition for a non-accredited institution
Aren't US tuition fees already bloated?
> afford to hire good professors away from existing universities
Why not hire the professors that are still good yet not perfect enough to get through the brutal competition mentioned above?
> The employers require this because they see it (fairly or unfairly) as an easy way to weed out those who would be unqualified.
Why is it not possible for a private non-accredited college to establish an industry-recognized degree of reputation?
> Why is it not possible for a private non-accredited college to establish an industry-recognized degree of reputation?
You're absolutley right! This is very possible.
In practice, the process you describe is both more difficult than accreditation (because it's undefined) and less trusted by industry (because there's nobody trusted validating it).
Not always. Think programming language certification. If the company who created x offers certificate in x trust can be there. An exam is dufferent to a degree but it could work if say Apple or Microsoft started to offer a university and focus on tech like ai, etc. New York times offering an English degree. Scotland yard - security.
>Why is it not possible for a private non-accredited college to establish an industry-recognized degree of reputation?
It is absolutely possible. In fact, it doesn't even have to be a private institution. I have a CS degree from a public California university. The university itself is accredited, but my particular degree is not. There is no outside body that says that I learned anything at all about CS, just that I learned the bare minimum to get a bachelors degree from a UC school. The weight of the universities name is more than sufficient on its own to answer any question of whether my degree is worth anything.
Of course I suspect that it is in fact much easier to go down this path if you're already a globally recognized research university than if you're "Joe Schmoe's Computer Science Degree Emporium".
> Why not just build more universities?
Because enrollment and the numbers of students who can pay are dwindling [1].
> Also why not start a private education company that probably wouldn't be eligible to issue government-accredited degrees (who but medical doctors and lawyers needs them anyway?)
The main reason anyone in the US goes to college these days is to get a degree, not to receive education related to any specific job. They want to get a degree because most employers still require a degree either for consideration or for promotion. The employers require this because they see it (fairly or unfairly) as an easy way to weed out those who would be unqualified. Any employer that would accept a non-accredited degree from a private education company that could easily just be selling certificates (which already happens anyway) probably wouldn't even care if you had a degree in the first place.
> yet would provide university-level education quality and compete the free-market way
I just don't see there being a significant market of people willing to pay full tuition for a non-accredited institution, to the extent that it could afford to hire good professors away from existing universities and be a better option for them than pursuing tenured positions elsewhere.
Compounded with the unlikelihood that students would be able to get reasonable loans to attend a school that could very well be a scam, this seems completely untenable. Students get into enough debt as it is going to accredited institutions with government loans.
1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-disappearing-private-c...