Economist miguel urchiola says the us. system is peculiar for its astronomical levels of tuition. The earliest universities were founded in europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, places like oxford, the university of bologna,. univer of paris they were typically run by the church. With the reformation, 500 years later, they were mostly taken over by governments. This does have its upsides: If you were going to fall into a random german university or a random american one, you might want to choose the germ setting. But it also means there's less inequality and differentiation than in the us.
We think of them as intellectual enclaves and the surest route to a better life. But U.S. colleges also operate like firms, trying to differentiate their products to win market share and prestige points. In the first episode of a special series, we ask what our chaotic system gets right — and wrong. (Part 1 of “Freakonomics Radio Goes Back to School.”)