Paid $4,100 for two semesters and wants a refund I guess 
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This is accurate. In most cases profs aren’t even lecturing- rather, they are providing the course materials/assignments/exams and telling students to complete them by certain dates. Does anyone think that’s worth the cost they’re charging?
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My daughter-in-law is working on her masters degree in healthcare administration through Grand Canyon University. She was taking a class on statistics, and she could not get a tutor to help her - the ones who could supposedly help her kept bouncing her around saying that what she was studying was not in their field of expertise - and the professor refused to respond to her emails or offer any instruction beyond what was in the book. She queried some of her classmates and found that they were having a similar experience. I encouraged her to email the administration to share her concerns, but she did not feel like her concerns would be heard. She wound up dropping the class, but she will still need to take it later. I hope that her experience is better next time, but I worry about it.
My opinion is that the entire education system needs to be revamped, but I don’t think we have the stomach to do it. I think that instead of using the 19th century model that still overarches the education system today, we should start teaching to the jobs that we have today. I think that in 2nd grade, 5th grade and 8th grade kids should be tested for their aptitude and assigned to a course of education that is best suited for the child. By the time 8th grade is done, I think that kids are pretty well established in their learning patterns and it is pretty evident whether they would benefit from a college education or not. (At least I could tell with my kids.)
If the kids show an aptitude towards a college education, then let’s have them take more CE classes to reduce the amount of time they have to spend on generals at university to reduce the debt they accumulate. If the kids do not demonstrate a desire for college, then let’s put them through trade schools. Again, sit down with parents in 2nd and 5th grade to explain to the parents the trajectory their kid is on so that it is not a surprise in 8th grade, and if they really want Suzy to be a doctor, they can get tutoring or whatever to help her get on the path they want her to be on. I just know that my oldest would have benefitted far more from taking auto repair classes with basic English and math classes (maybe you could even teach kids how to create budgets for their auto repair shop instead of Calculus) than the classes to prepare him for college that he never intended to attend.
Following the 19th century model of taking summers off to work on the farm makes no sense in this world anymore. We need to remove the stigma from trades and let kids know that there is great value to society - and good money to be made - in doing manual labor. While I feel that there is value in a university education, it is not the end-all anymore. I mean, I studied music and eventually got a degree in Poli Sci with a minor in Spanish, after which I have spent the last 22 years as an application and database analyst. So while my degree gives me fun things to discuss, it has very little bearing on my career.
Like I said at the beginning, I doubt that we will change the way things have always been done. Until we do, however, I think that we can expect to continue to fall further behind the rest of the world in the quality of our education.
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I can say that while I probably did start to lean a bit more left than when I entered, it wasn’t really that far of a jump. And, tbh, after law school, my legal interpretation became more strict by the letter interpretation but I leaned policy wise more towards the left.
I imagine there are a lot of people like me who are maybe slightly different but not substantially so.
What I’ve seen in my experience is that STEM professors have become primarily researchers, meaning they become primarily full-time grant seekers (leaving research to the post-docs & grad students), and don’t focus as much on the teaching aspect. There are some that are good at and love teaching, but Universities are seeking professors that can bring in the grants and the money. They also throw some kickstarter money at them to set up labs. At some higher level schools, they will hire two former post-docs (hard to get in as a professor straight out of PhD at high level universities due to supply/demand) for 1 tenure track position and let them compete. This drives a terrible work-life and frankly, I’ve seen more foreign professors willing to pay that price for their career, which can make it harder for students on the education front (not trying to bash foreigners, but clear language and communication needs to be evaluated). Performance is based on research dollars and papers published. As long as teaching is adequate (read, at least mediocre), administrators are content. As long as they serve on a couple committees and check that box, they look the other way.
Universities are incentivized to raise prices to offer more amenities to attract students to gain prestige and rankings to attract better professors (and provide their cheap undergrad/grad labor force) to attract more grant money (of which the university gets a good chunk) and the cycle repeats. Loans fuel the fire and banks happily participate with a guaranteed return.
I think some of this is because government and private labs have decreased and outsourced research to universities. There used to be major labs like Bell labs, Kodak, GE that had massive research centers (there are still some, but fewer and less funded). Corporations wanted to eek out more profit and the investments were not helping quarterly earnings. There are still government labs (my dad was a career guy at one) but they are more narrow in focus. I just think this feeds the shift of where the money is going and how it has changed the purpose of Universities and the vision on what the real goals are (primarily to provide the workforce for the state/region). Universities just seem to have lost their way in the pursuit of money and prestige/rankings.
Edit: for full disclosure, I received an M.S. and Ph.D. in a STEM area and benefited from the system - getting free tuition and fees and a modest stipend ($15k-$20k/year) and scraped a few fellowships or scholarships together. When evaluating staying in academia to continue research and teaching, it was the continuous grant-writing that turned me off and I decided to work in the private sector (and a couple years at a gov’t lab). But I’ve seen the career path of grad-student colleagues. Actually, the professors usually don’t get rich of the research. They are limited to their 9-month salary and can add 3 months from research. In return the tenure provides job security and sometimes they then ramp down the hours, but usually their research is their passion anyway. Money goes to equipment (which improvements help with future research), grad student costs, but the university overhead/cut is crazy.
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