No one can live in a capital market without capital. Education has always been about capital markets - uneducated people are highly limited in their use. There has never been a school that was built for "free", it's always come from capital one way or another.
It used to be primarily private capital, people who believed in it's purpose. Outside of the top 1% Now nothing is built without students and taxes footing the bill.
If it cannot survive on its own merits then its existence is an abuse to the people it claims to support. Turn it into something else and let real solutions arise naturally.
No it hasn't? That's some insane revisionist history, and this is what I blame Reagan for. The attitude that universities and even education broadly primarily or solely exist for producing vocational training
The original and, to this day, primary unique purpose universities serve is facilitating research. Capitalists try to claim credit for all the progress in science and innovation that's happened since the industrial revolution, but the institutions that evolved into what we now consider academia predate it significantly, and it's important to note that they were not always viewed even by their benefactors as having immediate value in a direct economic sense. Most of their educational capability is a side effect of developing competency in training new researchers. People who fell off this track still often got a quality education and became better-rounded, and also people who could get to a university tended to be high-status, so for a while it was a decent-fidelity signal for the competence-status mix that hiring decisionmakers cared about. Trying to get everyone in on this not only devalued that signal, but has caused a lot of this institutional rot. I think we agree on the end of that story but not the beginning of it
Vocational training and especially apprenticeship should be encouraged and enabled more, and shoehorning universities into this role was misguided from the start
ideas of how it should be and the actual circumstances today are completely different. That ideal is abusive because it is not reflected in reality, taking advantage of young naive adults.
What are you on about, mate? Universities significantly predate even the concept of capital. Not universities as a concept, but specific universities that you can go to today - notably Oxford and Cambridge, but many others in Europe. And their purpose has almost always been scholarship, not employment. Most modern universities stem from institutions meant to find better ways to understand God's work, and perhaps to better worship it. The Catholic Church was the primary "investor" for a long stretch of time, at a time when it was a more powerful "state" than almost any other in Europe.
If you can find me a university free of a capital market I am more than willing to be wrong. The idea of universities generations ago are not at all how they are today.
You have claimed "education has always been about capital markets". I have exained that it hasn't. That we today live in a capitalist society and every single aspect of our lives is touched by capital to a higher or lower extent is a completely different claim.
Furthermore, you suggested that this (obviously false) history of education being driven by capital markets should be taken as a guide to letting capital control our education even more, as if the problem with universities today is that they are not capitalistic enough. The actual history suggests exactly the opposite.
It used to be primarily private capital, people who believed in it's purpose. Outside of the top 1% Now nothing is built without students and taxes footing the bill.
If it cannot survive on its own merits then its existence is an abuse to the people it claims to support. Turn it into something else and let real solutions arise naturally.