A 100% Free Market in Higher (College/University) Education?

[Travis Retriever]

Any examples of one?
Everyone else focuses on Education for kids (pre-K through 12th grade), but not on Colleges/Universities.
Any examples as to what a free market in higher education is like?
And any idea as to how it would be different (read: better) than what we have now?

[Travis Retriever]

The lack of replies leads me to believe that has been little, if any, put into the idea of free market universities...
Which as a college student is very depressing; that the pre-K through 12 education gets all the attention...

[Gumba Masta]

Don't worry, there is always the Patriot Bible University.

[AHPMB]

There is no 100% free market in higher education.  Colleges are subject to the vagaries of power and politics, and more and more by ludicrous standards that are self imposed to meet state approval.  Competition for grant money and government hand-outs have effectively ruined a great deal of what were once the world's best universities.  

It is grant competition that has created the wage slavery of the T.A. and adjunct system, while at the same time imposing ridiculous standards for publishing on tenure track faculty.  Publish! we're told, the university needs it's grant money!  It has become the only standard for success.  So you get the worst of both worlds: a rotating staff of barely qualified and untested faculty teaching students because the professors that have actually proven their merit are too busy to actually get around to teaching.  In other words, Universities, institutions that exist for the purpose of educating people, are failing at their primary mission in an effort to look prestigious, and win government grants.  The T.A.s get screwed, the University gets screwed and the students get doubly screwed.  

It's also the worst of both worlds in terms of labor.  The colleges actually end up spending MORE in admin costs in order to manage, inspect and vet this ever changing cavalcade of staff than they would by simply retaining an adequate faculty of qualified professors.  The adjuncts, and instructors themselves are paid a bare minimum because of this, and either have to spend their lives in poverty, holding onto the vain hope of getting a tenure track position, and winning their own golden ticket, or leave higher education.  And the faculty who do become tenured become so fossilized in their thinking, a thinking utterly focused on maintaining their current level of benefit status, that they actually work against their own purposes.  Thus they ossify and deify tenure, keeping the entire merry-go-round spinning.

If universities actually responded to market demand, both the adjunct system and the tenure system would be dumped in favor of full time salaried staff, that maintained benefits while still being rigorously monitored for quality of research and teaching.  This means a system where a respectable balance of teaching and research could be met, and more faculty would be employed.  This is flagrantly obvious to anyone working within the system, but it would require a group of universities that were dedicated enough to risk letting go of the government teat to do what was right by their business, and I'm not sure anything short of an organized revolt by their faculties and students is going to make that happen.

addendum:  The worst consequence of this, I think, is that it means universities are accepting way too many graduate students to have them work as unpaid teaching assistants simply because labor demands aren't being met.  They glamor them with the academic lifestyle, of free thinking and good hours and intellectual pursuits, when they know the majority of them will not be able to find rewarding work in their field.  They stick them in over-crowded classrooms and run them through the mill and then spit them out.  There is no way the market can support this many professionals, but universities accept them anyway to fill the gaps in a broken system, and then throw them into a dried up pond of a job market.  It's doing more than ruining education and wasting money, it's ruining hundreds of young lives every year.

[Travis Retriever]

Thank you very much for that reply, AHPMB.

It reminds me of Peter Schiff's thoughts on the higher education system.
He noted that college loans guaranteed by the state have inflated college costs past the roof.
That his dad was able to work as a part time job in the summer to pay for his the next two semesters of college education.
Something that would never happen nowadays.

Both him and Ladyattis noted that colleges are now extremely and unnecessarily bureaucratic.