Paging through The Last Knight, Guido Hülsmann summarizes the dismal conditions, the zeitgeist of the tertiary educational system Mises endured at the University of Vienna:
The lectures were infamously bad, resulting in part from a distinctive lack of consumer orientation on the part of the professors. After the government takeover of the Austrian universities, the professors had become financially independent of their audience and had little incentive to accommodate the needs of their students. This affected both their behavior and their public status. The government had turned them into civil-servant scholars—or to put it less flatteringly, into court intellectuals. "Academic freedom" no longer meant political autonomy. When the public spoke of "limitless academic liberty," they referred to freedom from responsibility or consequences.
That is on page 64 of the actual book (80 in the PDF).
Unfortunately the validity his observation has not faded with time. Arguably this is due in part to state intervention (the criminalization of discriminatory association practices by businesses [e.g., screening for intelligence]), accreditation cartelism, a unionized labor force, and various strains of a low-time preference "get-rich-quick" mentality spurred by degree inflation.
Maybe another hundred years will be enough time for positive changes to overcome these anti-consumer phenomena. See also: 1 2
