I remember a new CEO of a car company, about 10-15 years ago. After a few months on the job, he announced “I thought I was going to run a car company, but it is more like a health care and retirement company.” I would never deny anyone their pension, but when you have thousands and thousands of people receiving monthly checks / benefits, and not producing one car, the system will eventually fail. Combine that with today’s EV madness, and is it any wonder car companies are “scaling back.”
In China there are huge fields of brand new EVs. Reminds me of the Soviet Union farm tractor factories. Every day the workers would ‘fulfill’ their government mandated quotas. Outside the factory, hundreds of brand new tractors sat rusting away. Command and control economies only control the people.
Exactly what happened at the universities. Those sky-high tuitions are paying all the multimillion dollar value professor/administrator pensions.