> i don't know how you dismiss this as a false dichotomy so quickly.

Taking any two arbitrarily chosen things in life, such as student loans and mosquito nets, and making us choose is a false dichotomy. We could have both. It's true that we can't have everything, "we do not have limitless resources" as you say, but there's no inherent reason why we couldn't have both of those two arbitrarily chosen things.

Moreover, the amount of resources availabe is also a choice. We could raise taxes (we cut taxes massively a couple years ago). We could reduce or eliminate tax deductions. And of course we could reduce spending in other areas to compensate. To choose one example arbitrarily, the US spends vastly more on military and police than any other country in the world.

> what about this related talk around bankruptcy reform?

Yes, we should allow student loan debt to be discharged in bankruptcy. But that's not a solution to the problem, it's a last resort. Declaring bankruptcy sucks, and can wreck your credit, making you unable to make other important purchases. If declaring bankruptcy were that great, then everyone would just wildly accumulate debt and then write it off. Why wouldn't you?

The purpose of student loan forgiveness is to take a huge burden off the debtors. But bankruptcy is itself a burden. So you're just replacing one burden with another. Sometimes necessary, but still bad.

The only effective difference between student loan forgiveness and student loan discharge in bankruptcy is that in the latter case, you're making life more difficult for the debtor. In either case, the loan holder doesn't get their money back.

> primary school where it's as much about socializing kids as it is academic

So is college. Arguably, who you meet at college is more important than what you learn. This is why people want to go to highly prestigious schools, because you're surrounded by rich and powerful and influential people. Note that Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates both dropped out of Harvard — they didn't even get an undergrad degree!

There's not much evidence that what students learn in the classroom at Harvard is significantly different than what they learn at any other school. Math is math, science is science, literature is literature, etc. The point is to go to Harvard, to be at Harvard, and to have Harvard on your résumé. It's mostly social. The exclusivity is the point.

> for the university case, tuition has risen in the face of the two deflationary technologies i showed above (which on their own, should have decreased the cost of an equivalent education).

One thing you didn't mention though is decreasing government funding for colleges, at both the state and federal level. It's not the case and never been the case that tuition covers all operating costs.

> endowments aren't large enough to both make higher-ed free to future students and compensate previous students

You still haven't explained what "compensate previous students" means.

My feeling is that making higher-ed free to future students in perpetuity is the much more expensive proposition than forgiving some debt to former students, so if there's enough money for the former, it's unclear why there's not enough for the latter.