The naive economist who truly believes in the equal bargaining position of labor and capital would find all of these things very puzzling.

Free marketeers are claiming that if we build enough luxury housing it will eventually trickle down and turn into housing for the poor and middle class. This is the failed policy of Reaganomics at its worst.

Yet policymakers all too often fail to fit remedies to the circumstances. Rust Belt cities require set-asides just like San Francisco, while Bay Area institutions such as Stanford hand out generous housing subsidies to new faculty, a measure that only serves to drive housing prices up, instead of searching for ways to increase supply.

Funny how Corporate America loves the term “free market” except when they are under threat.

If the community source model proves viable, it will do so because it is an economically efficient coordinating mechanism for software investments in higher education as an industry. An analysis of any historical software system—online card catalogs, Web-based registration, course management systems—over a five-year period will reveal that individual institutions separately invested hundreds of millions of dollars in home-grown or commercial software. Can that flow of higher education resources be harnessed to create better economics and shared innovation outcomes for everyone?

As long as the income was incoming, we were happy to trade funding our institutions with our money (tuition and endowment) for funding it with other people’s money (loans and grants.) And so long as college remained a source of cheap and effective job credentials, our new sources of support—students with loans, governments with research agendas—were happy to let us regard ourselves as priests instead of service workers.

If we can’t keep raising costs for students (we can’t) and if no one is coming to save us (they aren’t), then the only remaining way to help these students is to make a cheaper version of higher education for the new student majority.