What evidence does he provide that the decline in quality of education is due to lower budgets?
Academic positions, like any other job, operate within a competitive labor market. Lower budgets mean less money to attract top talent. Cheaper iMacs can't change that.
Certainly. But technology can reduce the amount of labor used. For example, better OCR means typists can do something more valuable. There hasn't been much experimentation in teaching such as using video instructions and that is in part because of a lack of competition. Normally we would expect the marginal productivity of labor to increase with technology level.
> There hasn't been much experimentation in teaching such as using video instructions and that is in part because of a lack of competition.
Higher education does have competition (thousands of universities, both public and private), but technology hasn't brought the costs down there either.
We have no way to control for all of the variables. There are so many factors to why education costs are so inflated, the relative effect of technology on the cost is impossible to determine.
Teaching is a weird beast. Computational techniques have improved, but we haven't improved educational techniques much beyond "smaller class sizes" and "online lectures."
We can talk freely about the academic labor market, but it's hard to pin down what that labor market produces.
Smaller class sizes weren't an anomaly, larger class sizes were. Going through school the sizes increased from 18, then 20, then 30 when I graduated. My brother (2 years behind me) was at 35 and in demand classes (Math, English, and ESOL) were pushing 40.
It doesn't matter how much technology you through at the problem, teaching 40 kids is unsustainable. Teachers burn out, students lose focus, and it only takes 1 bad student to ruin class cohesion.
Academic positions, like any other job, operate within a competitive labor market. Lower budgets mean less money to attract top talent. Cheaper iMacs can't change that.