HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Big Troubles Ahead For Online Learning? I don’t think I buy this critique. The real problem with higher education as it exists today isn’t class-resentment of academics on the part of other Americans, it’s that higher education costs too much and delivers too little, and over the past decades the costs have been going up faster than inflation even as the value delivered has gone down. And that value has gone down even in non-economic terms, as the rigor in even “useless” humanities courses has faded.