"The bulk of US college students attend colleges who do not have the resources to build high-quality, industry relevant curriculum, train teachers to teach with modern pedagogy, and efficiently manage dorms, student affairs, and other administrative infrastructure"

I would like to see a source on this: your claim appears ungrounded when considering American colleges.

Am I misunderstanding your post?: you're implying that HYPSM increase their matriculation by ten times? These "elite" colleges,—one of which I've attended for graduate school,—have serious issues already with becoming degree mills; degrees have depreciated enormously in value over the last several decades: consider the collapse in being able to find a tenure track research position, even from one of these colleges. If we wanted elite colleges to provide the benefits that they are supposed to; then we would, if anything, want to reduce matriculation.

Stanford,—and I would hazard a guess many other HYPSM schools,—are already minting out too many students; this is especially true when it comes to non-PHD masters degrees, which are essentially an unbecoming cash cow for departments. Actual "quality of education" mostly comes from a low staff/student ratio and direct access of students to elite researchers: this difference in education mostly takes the form of better research labs to work in, with some spillover into office hours; increasing matriculation would only lead to more auditorium-sized classes that are run by lecturers or postdocs—these classes are essentially at the same level as trudging through online material.

Your proposed "solution" would have a Procrustean effect: I can't speak for Chinese or Indian universities, but while schools like UC Berkeley, UT Austin, University of Michigan, et seq... have good reputations, they have a noticeably lower reputation than the ivy leagues and certain private colleges like Stanford, MIT, and Caltech—and a worse reputation for being degree mills.

If you think that Stanford having 180,000 students matriculated will give everyone a quality education, then I think that you fundamentally misunderstand the markers that make an in-person education higher quality. The only benefit that would come of it would be popping the degree bubble and prematurely ending the current moribund trajectory that universities are on; where they are already treating degrees as if they were artificial-scarcity NFTs, rather than providing the actual scarcity that is access to,—and direct training from,—high-level researchers.

Great article. I recently went through Crying of Lot 49 by Pynchon; the sequence of eccentric personalities in this article reminded me of a similar section that Pynchon has in the bay area. Unfortunately the personages interviewed here are not only real but climb beyond any fictional parody.

You would forget that this would cause exponential growth: in a couple decades, a single lab could produce more people seeking tenure track than an entire country's worth of positions; there need to be smarter ways to provide the requisite labor for science, since this is clearly unsustainable praxis. Running a pyramid scheme of this magnitude is only going to cause an implosion—which we may already be witnessing.

There's a big difference between cutting off all foreign-born talent—and addressing the serious issue of graduate school turning into an immigration racket; the current issue with graduate degrees is a very close mirror to the issue with H1b worker visas. The abuse of both systems has harmed Americans—and to some extent the long-term health of the tech industry and the academy.