This is a great little insight, well put, and in fact you are understating the scope of the problem.
The impact of this issue is, if anything, greater on the cost of research than it is on the cost of an education. A major academic institution is the single most expensive place you could do research - because everything costs much more than it should, the headcount on any project is stratospheric, and everything moves so slowly that you pay much more for each "head" than you ought to. That has downstream affects that kneecap every industry reliant on academic research, from industrial and military competitiveness to medicine. It's also why there has been interest for decades, and seems to be increasing interest now, in private research lab investment from large philanthropists - it is legitimately cheaper and faster to pull a Paul Allen and stand up a new research lab from scratch than it is to get the same research done through traditional academic means.
Scott Galloway (who I know is somebody everybody has an opinion about now) has scoped this problem really well, though I've been much less impressed experientially with his solution (Section4). You're spot-on - if we optimized for creating productive members of society (bullet #2) and preparing individuals for financial independence and productivity (bullet #1) individually - or even just ceded #2 temporarily (which is a role, arguably, existing colleges are failing at anyway) and optimized toward #1 - it could be done much more cheaply than it is being done today. NOT through any kind of high-minded shift in how education is done, as education, in the sense of a teacher-in-a-classroom-teaching-students-supported-by-TAs, is not broken, and has worked for centuries. But college today is like a really bad cable bill, where the vast majority of users are paying for one thing (ESPN), but have their cost burdened by 90% of the package being a required purchase that they don't want. (All the other channels)
Other dimensions of the problem better support disruption, but most directly, your point would be well addressed by colleges simply reducing overservice. Of course, that implies gargantuan changes to the structure of these institutions, which will be wildly uncomfortable for a lot of individuals who are currently supported by them.
Non-STEM viability, in any sustainable sense, is a productivity problem.
It's similar to the debate around onshoring manufacturing. There is a clear and simple (not easy, simple) way we can have more blue-collar workers making livable wages in the United States, despite that livable wage requirement being much higher than what other countries require to produce the same goods - improve either the quality of the outputs or the productivity of each laborer. My understanding is this is how Germany held such a strong position in manufacturing for years - by doing things better. It's also why one of the most direct blue-collar paths to a six-figure salary in the U.S. is machine shop work, because the U.S. has, in some regions, maintained the ability to produce parts that cannot be produced more cheaply elsewhere, by developing and maintaining a highly skilled workforce and the tools to support them within that particular sector.
Put in the negative sense - I would be curious to know what the average profit generated by an average farmworker is these days, after both internal and external expenses are taken into account, and how much slack there is between the wages they are currently earning and that profit. My understanding from family-owned / smaller operations is that running a farm in 2022 is really hard and really expensive, and that there isn't a whole lot of slack there right now.
Of course, there is a solution other than increasing productivity - a giant mess of regulatory and fiscal policy that, in direct and indirect ways, subsidizes the industry in a way that makes paying farm workers a livable wage tenable in a way a truly free market would not bear. And those policies are reasonable and even desirable within certain frameworks, and furthermore may be necessary as an interim step toward increased productivity. But wouldn't it be better for America to be able to subsidize a whole bunch of six-figure salaries not simply because that is what people need to live (i.e., that it is a public good to have six-figure salaries, and so we will take on public cost to ensure they exist), but because we have a whole bunch of people that generate six-figures annually in productivity?
Obviously, this is all empirically justifiable or refutable, so if I'm totally off my rocker qualitatively and if there's something offensive here like, "each farmworker actually generates $1.1MM/yr in pretax profit for the average farm employer", then let's frame all that out and legislate til the cows come home. And once they're home, too.
That's the attention-share majority, and it's the majority that gets the most press largely because it's so relevant to the press and to people who read a lot of press (investors, other media), but it's an overstatement to say it's the entirety.
Just looking at some quick stats, a little more than half of all STEM occupations are outside of "Computer Occupations", though that one chunk is by far the largest single chunk. And far from the entirety of "Computer Occupations" is ad-supported web apps.
There are a lot of fucking engineers (traditional engineers - based on the definition of 20-30 years ago) out there, and a great many of them make a solid living off it. Most of them simply do their job in relative obscurity compared to the computer workers these days.
I've tried Coda a couple times, but have always ended up at the same roadblock encountered with Airtable / Smartsheet / etc. - any "power user" type integrations require learning entirely new workflows that don't translate to any other system. Put another way, these systems should obviate the need for dedicated "Rev Ops" headcount, but the narrow scope of applicability of Coda knowledge (traditional stack knowledge translates poorly into Coda; Coda knowledge translates poorly into any other system) has always meant it's felt like more work than upside, at least in my use cases.
The other two are new. Patera is gorgeous, and the very definition of elegant, based on what I can see. I could easily see myself running proposal documents through something like this to make them much more scalable.
Grid is even more interesting, though I'll have to dig in. A huge crop of dynamic forecasting tools (effectively masks over spreadsheet backends) seem to have sprung up in the past 18mo - I'm most familiar with Causal, but this goes a meaningful step further. Will be digging into it this week.
Thanks much. I'd love to roll something like this out across both my 9-to-5 and a couple of the consulting gigs I do. I see immediate applications in proposal/RFP management (where there are numerous existing solutions, all of which have some critical flaw), contracting (to ensure contract docs align with references and data sources), legal briefing management (which is, to me, the ultimate use case for any system intending to refine the integration between documents and other documents, or documents and data) and obviously academia. If you are looking for early product-market fit, designing to serve one of those markets extraordinarily well could get you some traction.
I am utterly shocked it has taken this long for something like this to come around. Direct integration of data flows into document processing has been an obvious next-step-up for any kind of scalable document production/management framework for at least the past few years. The amount of time I have to spend on a regular basis inputting, updating, and managing information that is presented in documents but compiled in other places has me apoplectic on a weekly basis.
I'll tell ya, at the moment, this isn't quite where I need it to be, because every team I work in/with is entirely Drive / GDocs-centric, and so what I'll need in the long-run to roll it out is a native integration within that interface. I'd love for GOOG to just buy y'all and integrate that capability into their rapidly-growing Workspace capabilities. Until then, watching with great interest, may play around with it a bit.
The impact of this issue is, if anything, greater on the cost of research than it is on the cost of an education. A major academic institution is the single most expensive place you could do research - because everything costs much more than it should, the headcount on any project is stratospheric, and everything moves so slowly that you pay much more for each "head" than you ought to. That has downstream affects that kneecap every industry reliant on academic research, from industrial and military competitiveness to medicine. It's also why there has been interest for decades, and seems to be increasing interest now, in private research lab investment from large philanthropists - it is legitimately cheaper and faster to pull a Paul Allen and stand up a new research lab from scratch than it is to get the same research done through traditional academic means.
Scott Galloway (who I know is somebody everybody has an opinion about now) has scoped this problem really well, though I've been much less impressed experientially with his solution (Section4). You're spot-on - if we optimized for creating productive members of society (bullet #2) and preparing individuals for financial independence and productivity (bullet #1) individually - or even just ceded #2 temporarily (which is a role, arguably, existing colleges are failing at anyway) and optimized toward #1 - it could be done much more cheaply than it is being done today. NOT through any kind of high-minded shift in how education is done, as education, in the sense of a teacher-in-a-classroom-teaching-students-supported-by-TAs, is not broken, and has worked for centuries. But college today is like a really bad cable bill, where the vast majority of users are paying for one thing (ESPN), but have their cost burdened by 90% of the package being a required purchase that they don't want. (All the other channels)
Other dimensions of the problem better support disruption, but most directly, your point would be well addressed by colleges simply reducing overservice. Of course, that implies gargantuan changes to the structure of these institutions, which will be wildly uncomfortable for a lot of individuals who are currently supported by them.