Comment by greenail

Maybe the incentives for universities are all wrong. In the early 1900's only 4% of the US went to university. There ended up being a big push to get more people into college with the assumption that it would benefit society. Eventually we ended up with a notion that everyone should go to college and this has been buttressed with government support but what if this idea is wrong? What if the incentives created lots of university departments that were superfluous, producing nothing that was actually benefitting society. This may show up as lots of superfluous/unreproducible papers and journals many not even based on the scientific method. Maybe the incentives focused universities on creating more "education" so they could rake in the cash made readily available through government subsidies targeting those who could not complete STEM degrees. Have we reached a state of elite-overproduction?