'Man, ok so having customers pay for a product rather then receive it for free, is a failed free market experiment...?'

YES! EXACTLY!

This neoliberal commodification of education using debt and imposed market model structures corrupts the entire ethos of higher education.

It puts young people into debt and changes the incentives and values that underpin the higher education system.

Instead of being a pursuit of knowledge education becomes a crude process of people investing in and providing a commodity with the aim of gaining material wealth.

This undermines the whole value system that once was what universities were about- the pursuit of knowledge.

The great and tragic irony is that the commodification process where a market model is imposed changes the incentives to primarily economic incentives, the result is that quality of teaching and learning declines and the economic and wider societal outcomes over the long term decline also.