As with all other services, people can voluntarily offer to provide teaching or training, and those who are interested in such services can choose among the individuals and institutions offering them in the market. That is true for primary and secondary education (and during the COVID disruption, many parents are discovering that they can organize "learning pods" that are proving so effective that the public school monopoly feels the need to denounce them), as well as for post-secondary education — college and grad school.

The United States would be a far better educated country if government had kept entirely out of education. Unfortunately, it did not.

In this article, I'm going to focus on the damage government meddling has done in higher education. Owing to interference (mainly by the federal government) in the higher education market, today we have prodigiously expensive but largely ineffectual colleges and universities. Students often spend more than four years in pursuit of a degree that betokens scant learning, but in doing so, they amass huge debts. Often they are unable to repay those debts, despite "lenient" policies, thus leaving the taxpayers stuck with the cost.

It wasn't always that way. In fact, college education was not at all expensive, and academic standards were quite rigorous — until the government stepped in.