What do you think they get paid in academia? Get retired professors who are either eminent in their fields or outstanding teachers. No more grad assistants doing the actual teaching.
Look, I don't pretend to have all the answers or any of them for that matter. I can recognize a model that has clearly outlived its usefulness however, and now has become a huge dead weight on the economy.
It's a sad confirmation of how easily millennials can be gaslighted however that they blame everybody but the universities that gouged them for an inferior product.
Well if you get an American Literature degree from Harvard it is not an inferior product, it is a top notch degree in that field. Just that the earning potential in that field is shit as you are only good for teaching or being a failed writer. So you get the degree but cannot do shit with it. This is a failure at the student and parent level. People have to take responsibility and not blame the university entirely, they don't walk you in at gunpoint and say "Take this Sports and American Culture major!"
Our parents cmae out of college and had jobs a lot easier than now so they are not educated in pushing their children to say "Hey if you like English Lit, then minor in it but your major better be something you can bank on or go to a JUCO for 1/100th the price."
The only way to teach this lesson is to allow students to be burdened by their debt but give them breathing room so that they can work to pay it off. I don't feel sorry for an English Lit major who is waitressing, you could fucking temp and earn more money and tough shit if you don't like it, no one gives a shit if you can break down Great Expectations.
They will work their asses to pay it off but they will and when their kids go to college and tell them they want to major in Film Studies, the ass kicking will be so swift.