What are the three biggest problems facing universities today? What problems of knowledge do these represent?

*Disclaimer: I don't think I interpreted the question correctly.  You might be better off finding someone else's blog* 

In no particular order:

Tuition: The cost of college, as "The Ivory Tower" pointed out, is skyrocketing, and may possibly be unsustainable.  

          Problem of Knowledge?: Sense Perception:  Sticker shock is a thing experienced by parents sending kids off to college. The price tag causes a kind of disconnect.  Common knowledge is that college is necessary for a "successful" life. However, it's so expensive that parents and kids have to wonder if the debt they may have to take on for college is really worth it. 

 The price of knowledge:  Does knowledge have a price?  Should it?  Clearly, colleges have put a "price" on knowledge, in the form of teachers and textbooks.  But there are also other costs, which leads into....

Expansion: To compete with each other, colleges have been expanding spaces and including as many amenities as they can (rockclimbing walls, pretty buildings, etc.) Colleges have to have the best of everything, from food to research.  The administrative staffs of colleges have expanded sigificantly as well.  All this needs to be paid for somehow, and it may becoming too much.

         Problems of Knowledge?:  Emotion: A lot of the extra stuff is so students can enjoy themselves, but is it helping or hindering their pursuit of knowledge? Especially at schools known for partying, is the label causing them to cater to those who have no desire to learn? 

Language: Colleges use their expansions as advertisement, a kind of visual language.  New shiny buildings and pretty settings imply an aura of prestige, of being at the cutting edge.  But one shouldn't judge a book by its cover. It's possible (maybe even probable) that 

Value (for student): Related to Expansion and Tuition, there are an increasing number of questions about the usefulness of college, especially when compared to the cost, and what it pays for.  

           Problems of Knowledge?: Memory: How does memory change our knowledge?  The value of college may have changed, but there could be a generation (or more) with memories of a different time, when college meant something else.  Could memory result in knowledge being suppressed or distorted?

Reason: This kind of relates to memory and emotion.  How is reason affected by both/either of them? Reason, memory, and emotion are all ways of knowing, and how they interact affect one's knowledge.  

Knowledge Question Based on "The Ivory Tower"

To what extent do Memory and Language distort belief (that College is (or isn't) a good investment)?

Specifically: The part where they were discussing how older people lived in an era where it was possible to pay your way through college, and don't necessarily understand it's usually no longer possible for the current generations.

Is Economics a Science?

             At least in TOK, economics gets grouped in the human sciences, along with psychology, anthropology and others.     According to Merriam-Webster, the simple definition for science is :"knowledge about or study of the natural world based on facts learned through experiments and observation," or a "subject that is formally studied in a college, university, etc."   Economics is, at the very least, a science according to the second definition, since it gets studied in college.  The simple definition of economics, also according to Merriam-Webster is "a science concerned with the process or system by which goods and services are produced, sold, and bought."                Economists do experiments, using the scientific method, and often have results that can be replicated, as would be expected of a science. One paper in Science found that of the 18 (which is a pretty small sample size) other papers on microeconomics it had looked at, 11 (61%) similar results when the experiment was repeated. This is not absolutely great, but if you compare it to a 2015 analysis of psychology papers, which could only replicate 36% of the published results, it's pretty good.    

           

            However, it could (and has been) argued that economics is too unreliable to be considered a science.    Like most of the human studies, economics is based on humanity, and it's hard to exclusively focus on one variable of humanity and look at its affect. It wouldn't be hard to find a variable, but correlation of that variable to something else doesn't necessarily equal causation.  With economics, there are too many variables that are too interconnected to each other to be able to separate and find the exact effect they have.      

       

         I would still argue that economics are a science, because even if they aren't always right, neither are the other more "established" sciences.  For example, Watson and Crick went through a couple of different models of DNA before they came up with the currently accepted one.  Science is a process, where theories will be made, and then some will be shown to be incorrect. That economics has such a varied set (humanity) it needs to draw results from simply means there will be a lot more incorrect theories.