I watched a video about the current crisis that universities are facing, produced by a16z, and it gave me a lot of inspiration.

Universities play an important role in our society as it educates and shapes the mindsets of leaders from all areas, business, government, and technology. And they also function as policy think tank, technology incubator, etc. Thus, it's worth our attention to talk about scrutinize what kind of universities we need.

Universities can be viewed as a bundle of functions: credentials, course education, sports team, venture capital, policy think tanks. These various aspects encounter an array of challenges.

Let's take the degraded credentials of universities as an example.

In a most direct sense, universities provide credentials for their graduates. However, the prestige of credentials of good universities has been degraded over years. One reason is that the enrollement standards of good universities is lower more relaxed. Previously standardized tests like SAT are the primary criteria for university admission, serving as measure of candidates' IQ and allow uni to select those talented ones individuals. Yet, the weight placed on standardized tests has diminished, with factors such as sports (athletic achievements）, music, extracurricular accomplishments and even donations gained more weight (carrying more importance).

On the academic side, professors are not motivated to provide stringent grading as they might have incentives to enhance their popularity by giving good scores (awarding higher scores) , which could be beneficial (advantageous) for promoting their new publications and to avoid complaints from students and even their family. Moreover, we have more extension schools (the rise of extension schools) which are usually operated under the umbrella of a famous university but have a lot lower enrollment standards, has further contributed to uni credentials inflation.

The financial burden resulted from the these changes are significant. Tuition fees have surged to three times the average price, student loans are dramatically increasing, and the government has had to provide multiple bailouts as students are not able to repay loans with a salary less than they expected when applying for loans (lower-than-expected post-graduation incomes). It's worth noticing that loan bailouts place a burden on other taxpayers who do not have student loans, which means that society as a whole is paying for (footing the bill for ) uni education that is less valuable than it should be (may not offer the anticipated value).