Besides blistering heat, continued conflict in the Middle East, and World Cup controversy (even the US is getting into it), summer 2026 has brought spirited discourse on higher-education social media (yes, it exists). Topics include translations of The Odyssey (Fagles, Lattimore, Wilson, or Nolan), the role of activism in higher-education reform, teaching with Great Books, and (of course) how AI is changing the profession.
Running through all these debates is a broader issue about what higher education is. For the ancient Greeks, education was paideia—a holistic system of upbringing and cultural training, not just schooling but the complete formation of the human soul, mind, and body to produce a well-rounded, virtuous citizen who can participate in civic life. Modern education seems far-removed from this ideal—increasingly vocational and transactional, preposterously expensive, and vulnerable to competition from more efficient alternatives (including those powered by AI).
We don’t need no education—or do we?
An implication of the classical view is that students (and perhaps even parents) don’t know what they want; the educator’s job is to tell them. After all, education isn’t a commodity like toothpaste—we don’t want a system in which providers compete to offer consumers the education goods and services they want at the lowest prices. From this perspective, AI tools—however useful in teaching specific skills or tasks like car repair or sourdough baking—are not a threat to the conventional educational model.
The point of education is to form preferences not to pander to them https://t.co/sRyNgNhJSH
— Zena Hitz (@zenahitz) June 15, 2026
Let me explain why I think this view is mistaken.
For starters, it’s true that education—like health care, privacy, and relationship-building—is a particular type of commodity. It is what economists call an experience good, exchanged in markets fraught with asymmetric information. It is governed by a byzantine set of regulations and legal restrictions supported by one the most powerful political lobby associations in most countries. Consuming education is very different from consuming toothpaste.
And yet, educational activities take place in the real world, involving the use of scarce resources (land, buildings, books, equipment, teacher and administrator labor, and more) to produce specific goods and services (books, articles, lectures, exams, certificates, degrees, etc.). Call these education goods. While there is no market for “education” as an abstract category, there absolutely are markets for (and non-market, state provision of) educational goods and services. Confusing the abstract category with the actual goods and services leads many people astray. (The same is true for similar categories like health care and consumer privacy.)
Thinking about education goods and services
Focusing on the production and consumption of education goods raises many interesting questions.
What is the production function? People don’t consume “education,” any more than they consume love or friendship or truth or beauty. Instead, people exchange specific, discrete units of educational goods and services (books, lectures, degree programs) which are produced using capital and labor. There is nothing magic about education in this sense. As a lover and collector (and occasional producer) of books, I regard them as special entities—books open your mind, they change the way you think, they transform your experience, and so on. But I also recognize that a book is produced using capital (paper, ink, binding materials, machinery, transportation infrastructure, digital networks and devices, the financial system) and labor (from authors, editors, publishers, marketers, etc.).
Who is the consumer? Critics of the student-as-consumer model are correct, at least for primary and secondary education. The consumer is the parent or some institution or entity playing the parental role. For tertiary education and “education” in the broad sense (e.g., buying a book, attending a paid lecture, subscribing to a podcast, hiring a consultant), the person receiving the education is, literally, the consumer—the person who decides whether or not to engage in the transaction. Do such consumers make “wise” choices? Who knows. But arguments for paternalism and other forms of regulation must proceed on the merits and do not follow from the general claim that education is somehow “different” from other goods and services.
How is production organized? While the institutions of higher education have changed dramatically over the centuries, in some sense the basic model has changed very little. Teachers are employed by schools, schools are members of larger networks (in the old days, typically governed and supported by religious bodies, now by secular ones), courses are arranged into curricula or degree programs which are certified by some higher authority, students are certified through writing and examinations, and so on. Some teachers are paid on a piece-rate basis but most are salaried (and in some cases, protected by de jure or de facto tenure which allows them to speak and write with limited outside interference). Most faculty engage in some combination of research, teaching, and service, though the allocation of effort varies widely across faculty categories and different types of institutions (e.g., research universities, liberal arts colleges, technical and vocational schools).
While we have many more subject areas, majors, certificates, and degree programs than our predecessors—let alone labs, startup incubators, technology commercialization programs, and in the U.S., semi-professional sports teams—the organization of the industry has remained remarkably stable over a long time. As it is sometimes put, who is the Henry Ford or Steve Jobs of higher education? Where are the disruptive innovators who radically alter the structure of the industry? Why haven’t big changes in technology, demographics, and funding led to a shakeup? For an industry that (in recent years, anyway) prioritizes diversity, why is there so little diversity?
I think regulation (and the resulting cartelization) is a large part of the answer, though there are many other explanations, as discussed in this post.
What are we actually exchanging? It often helps in these discussions to distinguish average from marginal effects. When we consume a complex, larger good or service, part of that transaction often includes our choice to delegate the details to the provider. If I book a tour of the Acropolis, part of what I’m paying for is the tour company’s judgment about what parts to visit, how long to stay in each section, when is the best time to go, what I should look for on each structure, and so on. I’m choosing “Teach me about the Acropolis” but asking the provider to use his or her specialized knowledge and expertise to say what specific activities that involves, on the margin.
This perspective challenges the view that only the teacher can decide what should be taught. In reality, teachers can offer their expertise, track record, and the like—including their authority to decide the specific contents of an educational program—to students (or parents or community members) who pick the teacher. Nothing about the teacher-as-expert or teacher-who-tells-you-what-you-should-want model implies that educational goods and services cannot be produced, priced, exchanged, and consumed in the same fundamental way as other goods and services. The market for toothpaste, it turns out, isn’t actually that different.
Technology and the future
Will AI be the revolutionary, disruptive technology that forever alters the industry? Will it encourage a greater variety of educational types, patterns, providers, units, categories, and so on? Will students still attend (mostly) in person, will they have majors and minors, will they earn degrees, will they seek networking and certification as well as learning? Will new players emerge as in Christensen’s famous model of industry disruption? Will the abstract notion of education be transformed as the production and distribution of specific, discrete quantities of educational goods and services evolves? Who knows, but I am eager to see what happens.
