> 2)  Governments always foul up education.  If there are not enough good
> graduates coming out of the world's schools.......   let private  
> industry take over.

Two nitpicks:

1. (Democratic) Governments are the incorporation of the populace's need to be
governed. Therefore whatever the governments do is something that the majority
goes along with (if not willingly, then stupidly). So they do not foul up
education any more than the electorate lets them. That includes 'free 
education' that actually costs boatloads of money in books, specific 
proprietary software and mandatory extra-curricular activity as well as 
inflated prices for college education supported by taxpayers who do not get
equal access to education (if you want to know what a school thinks a degree 
is worth, check the price they charge foreign students - the difference between
that and what locals pay comes right out of your pocket, even if you do not 
have kids who go to college).

2. Private education industry sells image more than anything else. When left
unchecked it produces a mass flow of 'engineers' in sanitation, funeral
services, roofing, and certain operating systems that shall remain unnamed.
Moreover, any state certification of such private education is strongly 
hampered by the state education system itself, which sees the privates as
dangerous competition. If the parents/electorate do not stomp down and get an
independent equivalence and accreditation system implemented then this 
situation will continue indefinitely.

It is not rare that private educational institution's accreditations are 
revoked as fast as they are accorded, with dire consequences for the students,
some of whom may see their careers deleted from underneath them.

Ultimately industry weeds out the useful from the chaff but it takes many years
for this to happen. Industry's reliance on degrees as an entry requirement is
not exactly productive in this context. In fact the requirement of a degree in
this and that from candidates for a job, when said degree is not recognized by
local educational institutions if issued elsewhere, while the industry accepts
it, is in itself an eyebrows-raising issue. Utimately, industry are the people
who pay, so all the foodfights about accreditations are just a private
backstabbing circus between unions, state sponsored education and private
education, that will go on only as long as parents/electors will let it.

Note that I am not in the US, I do not have a degree, and I have had a number 
of encounters of the third kind with both state-controlled and private
educational institutions (including the part with the dis-accreditation, 
or more exactly, the blatant lie about accreditation in one case).

Peter P.

PS: I once tried to see what exactly is so expensive about education. I tried 
to do a break-even calculation based on a small college's tuition fees for a
4-year program, of $20,000. I assumed that it operates without paying taxes (or
that they are balanced by letting owned assets, such as land and housing), that
it has endowments or other external revenues that maintain the usual assets
(library, computer center etc), and that it employs 10 tenured professors 
@$150k and 50 assistants @$50k, as well as other people (janitors, lab etc)
@$500k, and other costs to make $1M/yr operating costs. The question was, how
many $20k/4yr students it takes to break even. The answer is 900. That's with
one tenured professor per 90 students and one assistant per 18 students. Of
course this is totally bogus (including the $20k which is usually matched by 
the state in donations etc), but even so, one must ask oneself, why pay more ?
And then you look at certain huge universities which have tuition in the
$50k/year class, huge endowments, assets and other revenues, and constantly
fight to get more funding. Yes, they are progress machines, but who must carry
them ?


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