That's usually the problem. There is virtually no competition within a state university system. Even in open markets, incumbents are bloated with bureaucracy and politics but succeed by digging trenches around them to keep new players out.

Universities have already lost their stranglehold on access to information. Now they focus on their monopoly of credentialism. If they lose that too they might face real competition and adjust course. There may be both bottom-up and top-down approaches to eroding that current monopoly.

That’s why many institutions are focused on extra-academic investment: better amenities, better campuses, better sports teams, better housing, better “neighborhood outreach”, better marketing, etc.

A school’s academics are, in a way, secondary to the school’s brand/influence (with built in networking effects in the alumni base)

Imagine some crazy world where education-level is a protected class for employment and degree/school can’t be considered or explicitly asked about in job applications. The credential monopoly would be no more. Yet you would likely still see top colleges thrive for the same reason top fashion houses do: status signaling, brand loyalty, and a sense of belonging with patrons who subscribe to the same values

But there's competition and competition. The US private health care system is supposedly competitive, but competes on the wrong things. I read a WSJ article purporting that cities with more health care competition had higher costs.

College could be another case where competition drives up costs.

Another option is to eliminate reasons to compete. Just standardize the offerings and the administrative structure required for a university. Students can choose the school that's closest to home, and go there with confidence.

Sorry but this never happens in practice, this is an example of just pure ideology.

Every large (read stable) corporation has created it's own bureaucracy. The "scrappy start-ups" that become successful by becoming profitable in their own right (and are not merely bought up by the large corporations) eventually develop their own. There a serious lack of examples of successful large orgs where bureacracy is in fact minimal.

Mark Fischer in Capitalist Realism made a good note of this, how the capitalist world of the west recreated the bureacratic culture in a host of in what are its institutions (which are obstensibly businesses) that existed in soviet russia, and in many ways surpassed those systems.

> Every large (read stable) corporation has created it's own bureaucracy. The "scrappy start-ups" that become successful by becoming profitable in their own right (and are not merely bought up by the large corporations) eventually develop their own.

Yes, that was even heavily implied in my post you're critiquing!

This cycle of very bureaucratic orgs being outcompeted by lightly bureaucratic orgs, which then grow very bureaucratic, and are in turn outcompeted, results in a medium bureaucracy level on average in the long run.

But how do you compete with Harvard? In practice, the bureaucracy has captured the brand and the brand is what students are buying.

It's more likely that the entire western system is outcompeted than it is that the current set of elite schools are outcompeted within our system, imo.

Democracy combined with local units significantly valuing their autonomy also seems to work, e.g. the International Typographical Union example from Union Democracy.

There are very few competitive industries. Most have consolidated in to 2-5 big companies that own most of the market. Often competitors are barred from entry due to regulations or other government force

3-5 companies is enough to be competitive. If there were lots of small ones it truly would be impossible to regulate; that’s why there when there’s a public utility, there’s only one of it.