> define more competitive markets - Is it even possible?

Yes it is, and I am using it in the traditional sense of "Sellers vying to make their offerings more compelling so consumers prefer them to alternatives". A more competitive market has more of the above fighting happening, which can be incentivized in several ways.

Specifically for the US, I already gave a massive truck-sized example of how you can make offerings more competitive: repeal recent 1970s policy changes that make college debt work different than essentially all other debt in being non-dischargeable, and lenders will put pressure by refusing to lend for failschools. This will slash their demand, and survivors will be expected to provide more compelling “when examined actuarially” lifetime student economic outcomes: from the lender’s perspective, the education needs to be expected to at least pay for itself. Schools in a world with dischargeability will therefore make efforts to compete on being able to compellingly show “we are imparting an effective education which equips you to repay what you spent”, and in general will be less able to get away with “we have a strong brand and you’re young and naïve, come study here!”. You can fool an 18 year old, you won’t fool the underwriter.

Specifically for the EU, there’s three approaches I’d like to see considered, the first and last more experimental than the others. It’s a widely agreed upon problem that faculty aren’t incentivized or often even that good at actually teaching, and to a lesser extent they’re also bad at training graduate students, because professorial incentives are to be good at research and grant writing, the thing for which universities pay their salary.

Historically, many universities used a different mode where they kept permanent salaried faculty positions very limited, and rather than charge a tuition, most schools and professors were expected to charge a fee or honorarium they would collect from their individual pupils as the bulk or totality of a professor’s compensation.

We moved away from this because historically teacher compensation was abysmal and we wanted to better support educators in studying - the pendulum swung way too far the other way though, and professors are essentially totally insulated from needing to seriously engage with their student body - they make a salary no matter what and it shows when they teach like it. Returning to a market where teachers’ financial outcomes are at least partially linked to their students explicitly choosing and paying professors chosen fees rather than a tuition which everyone in society pays stochastically, professors are incentivized to competitively vie for being better at training and teaching, because their prosperity and success would be linked to it.

Second, as much criticism as the US model gets for its prices, much of that appears to be driven by administrative bloat and nondischargeability, payment itself is actually really great when dischargeable because it seems prices stay low and this bloat doesn’t happen when it is. It also means a significant fraction of students do try to get into the best school they can and the schools have some incentive to fight to be seen as better - they make their money when students go. The results speak for themselves: something like half to two-thirds of the world’s top 100 universities are all in America.

Last, I’d like to see both European and US models collaborate harder on job and work placement as part of ensuring student success. Colleges being a source of a liberal education without concern for fiscal outcomes can be great, but the pendulum swung too far and these students are essentially thrown out into the world without any expectation of success, because the school no longer has any investment in them. I’d like to see some portion of the fee of education be moved to explicitly garnished wages from placed-into-their-trained field employees - you succeeding would therefore be the university’s success.

I’d therefore like to see taxes slashed on education with moves to paid models comparable to how they existed in the US prior to the 70s, reductions in permanent salaried academic positions with in-kind movements of price of tuition from the school at large to being in baked into professorial fees instead, and moving the funding of education from societal fees to a fixed percentage of post-graduation salaries for some fixed time, to incentivize effective job placement.

The common bailiwick that needs to die is that Europeans don’t pay for college - they do, it’s just compulsory, lifelong, and in a way that is not incentivized to produce quality.