So you want to maximise economic rent on the education of the masses and you wonder why societies are resistant to that, plainly because the outcome is horrendous.
Horrendous educational products are probably better than every institution in some regions, the median community college in other regions, etc..
Academic institutions, even very poor ones, have a lot of local leverage through employing academics who are integrated in the community and that is largely lost in distance education.
If you go and try to make an awful school somewhere I think you will get a great deal of assistance compared to if you offer a much better online education to the area built somewhere else.
Solving a problem and asking someone to pay for it doesn't have to be "rent seeking". If you want a service to work well and continue to, it's in your best interest to pay for it.
Who is getting the service here the individual or society. A neoliberal world view might assume there is no society but that is patently absurd.
If society wants too have a functioning and prosperous economy it should provide education as a utility not something that's geared towards profit. If anyone thinks neoliberal solutions will bring anything other than economic rent seeking you've been living under a rock for the last 40 years.
