The Crisis in Higher Education

Everyone agrees higher education is in crisis—tuition rising ten times faster than the price level, administrative bloat, a looming demographic cliff, collapsing public confidence. Peter Klein argues these are symptoms, not the disease. Answering the claim that education is a special good beyond ordinary economic analysis, he shows that what markets actually deliver are discrete units of educational goods and services, and that standard Austrian analysis applies as readily here as to shoes. The structural problem is that there is no free market to speak of: state entities own most institutions, even elite privates draw nearly half their revenue from government, and a handful of federally licensed accreditors control entry. Following Rothbard, Klein's answer is the separation of education and state—with the Mises Institute itself as a working example.Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 23, 2026.Mises University is the world's leading instructional program in the Austrian School of economics, and is the essential training ground for economists who are looking beyond the mainstream.