Academia as an Industry...

About that last post, I imagine there are two problems with treating academia as an industry:

1. We have a monopoly- we produce a product- educated people- and then we're the ones that get to decide if that product is faulty. Even if our students couldn't add 2 and 2, we could still give them a degree saying that they were college-educated. This is why grade inflation is the unofficial norm at universities like mine- who could stop it? Who would want to? Certainly not professors, the students, or the parents. And really there's no outside assessment. I can't think of any equivalent to this in any other field.

2. When I say that ''this will not last'', it implies that we all understand that a failing industry will eventually have its day of reckoning. This doesn't seem to be the belief in the US anymore. We're moving towards something like syndicalism, in which failing industries are ''rescued'' by the state until they can return to the free market. A truly failing industry would just become a ward of the state in that situation. And, indeed, public universities are already wards of the state. We basically have the situation that GM is looking for: we get bags of money from the government to produce a product that we assure the public is top notch, with no outside assessment whatsoever. So, caveat emptor, I guess...