In the last several years the nearly universal disposition for participation in higher education started to be seen, both by the academics and the general public, as a result of students’ irrationality. Students, influenced by the “myth of higher education” or the marketing strategies of higher education institutions, commit to a course of action that, according to the critics of mass HE, is economically unsound. The aim of this paper is to present an alternative way of thinking about individual agency, rationality and the compulsory element of education. I try to show how the negative consequences of mass higher education result from economically rational decisions of individuals. I also argue that mass higher education has many characteristics of a social trap, i.e. a process in which individual rationality has a detrimental effect on the common good. The theory of social traps makes it possible to explain how the diffuse, individual decisions generate an informal system of compulsory higher education and how this element of compulsion negatively impacts the potential for higher education reform.
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