The Stuart Butler article on Higher Education might be more convincing if he did not make serious errors of fact. For example he refers to “the deregulation that brought about the end of AT&T’s “Ma Bell” system”. To be clear, AT&T had a government sanctioned monopoly through an agreement between government and AT&T. The deal was that the FCC and DOJ would not impose anti-trust and licensing regulations on AT&T.
When this agreement was revoked the AT&T was forced by anti-trust regulation to break up and the FCC finally began to regulate the telecommunications market to ensure competition.
Regulation led to greater competition.

That is perhaps not surprising, what is exciting for Butler is that “Higher-education suppliers thus face an enormous untapped market”. Think not of how education can form people as citizens, parents and neighbours but think of all the money.
Sounds like reason to despair.