Dr. Tae is Full of Crap

This video from Dr. Tae (whose first name is surprisingly difficult to find) is a half-hour grumble about the state of higher education. The key moment, though, comes at 3:57, when he asks the rhetorical question, “Would you pay tuition to sit in this room?” He never faces the answer head-on: yes, because it’s all I’d be able to afford. If you want to cut classes from 200 students to 20 students, you need 10 times as many instructors. There aren’t that many good teachers out there, but even if there were, someone (Dr. Tae’s fairy godmother, maybe?) will have to find ten times as much money to pay for it. And yes, there’s a lot of fat and waste at universities (don’t get me started on the number of time-wasters whose only accomplishment is to subtract value from everyone else), but even if there’s a 50% saving there (which there isn’t), someone would still have to stump up 5X the current budget to bring the kind of education he idealizes to the masses. Anyone who isn’t willing to address that issue directly and honestly is just blowing gas.