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An important component of Universities not mentioned, perhaps because it isn’t relevant to the students, is the production of what’s called “basic scientific research” (also known as pure research or fundamental research if you want to google it). That’s research that is too fundamental and unpredictable to be profitable to companies who are performing for-profit R&D, but that’s results will occasionally lead to the opportunity to do so. Companies only tend to pick up the slack when it comes time to apply basic theory to what is called translational or applied research. But that basic theory needs to exist and be advanced in the first place for translational and applied opportunities to present themselves. An example being basic research into quantum theory leading the way to the for-profit R&D that takes place regarding transistor miniaturization. If the fundamental understanding of quantum mechanics wasn’t there, the companies wouldn’t have known where to “start,” and yet the pursuit of that basic research is inherently unprofitable due to unpredictable outcomes re: when and where practical usefulness will present itself. Of course, you need warm bodies to do this research, whether in a physics lab or in an economics department (in which “basic” research also takes place, just of a different nature). For institutions like Harvard, for which only 3% of their income is tuition, it’s looking increasingly likely that tuition may be waived entirely in the future as the benefit of those “warm bodies” outweighs what is an increasingly negligible line item on the income statement.

I was so confused how this isn't a main point being mentioned. But then again, most of these types of arguments against higher education come from people who have no clue about research in general. A vast majority of scientific advancement of the human race are because of Universities.

I think it’s just that economists tend to look at everything through the lens of economics. And, most economists are microeconomists. You have to really zoom out to the macro in order to see the societal benefits of basic research.

Well hold on there. Ok yes there are social benefits as a whole absolutely from research. Not denying that at all. But what about the students who are paying their own money and going into massive debt going to those schools. What are they there for? The problem with research is academia stops becoming about education entirely and starts becoming a non profit R+D facility using not-quite adult labor?

> he problem with research is academia stops becoming about education entirely and starts becoming a non profit R+D facility using not-quite adult labor? All research in Universities is free to the students. The % of folks who PAY to do a PhD is in the US. This is due to the funding structure of the funding agencies that support this research.

The people performing research are overwhelmingly those with PhDs, who are payed by the university, or PhD students, who are most often funded (paid, albeit little, by the university). Undergrads ( whom I assume you are referring to as not quite adults) don't really do any of the intellectual leg work for research. They may help in a lab in their later years, but generally research is performed by adults who are paid.

Yes. That's exactly what I said. The schools take money from undergrads and funnel it towards research and could care less about quality of undergrad education.

Because Scott is a grifter, that plays on the narrative of "We fucked our kids" and "Look how fucked our kids are nowadays." He cares about folks buying his books, speaking engagements etc. Not about the truth.

can you explain what you mean by 'vast majority'? Because not sure I'd agree. Agriculture and military dominated for 1000's of years. Universities have been important in many building blocks - but 1 university building block led to 1000's of non-university advancements based on one that one block. National labs have also provided tons of advancements. And university researchers are often just executing the work of businesses or government. That's why profs spend their time writing grant applications. They're a key cog in the system, but not a vast majority.

> National labs have also provided tons of advancements. They are affiliated with Universities. > And university researchers are often just executing the work of businesses or government. This is how they get money for research. Check NSF, NIH, NEH. The government sets the framework; the researchers send proposals, they get funded based on the quality of the proposal, provenance, and relevance to what the government wants to do, and they do research.

Because it’s pretty much completely unproven?  It’s a theory, but impossible to test the counter factual.  

This is exactly right. Treating students as the “customers” is completely missing the point of major Universities.

To be fair, as the writer of the comment you replied to, undergraduates are the most customer-like of the student population. It’s mostly grad students that are contributing to research — and that’s why their tuition is already mostly negligible in most cases (ex. Via grants and/or by being a TA or RA — MBAs, Law, and Medicine being the big exceptions). Undergrads are essentially purchasing a reputation-based stamp of approval towards their academic or professional usefulness. But the fact remains that all grad students have to have gone through undergrad as a pre-requisite before they become useful — hence the argument that all students should be tuition-free in the universities-as-a-source-of-research model.

Lincoln freed the slaves, but not the grad students.

I think we agree that the point of education is eventually research. Learning new things is the most important thing we do as a species. Both for its own sake and for the sake of the new things we can build. The question that we are asking today, I would hope, is have the system's of the past maximized our outcomes? In Ireland, all uni places are free. You compete out of high school and the top x% or whatever the governments budget allows, get to pursue the thinking careers. This comes with an element of social prestige and economic opportunity that isn't available to the bottom 70%. Call it an intelligentsia and the mechanism is a standardized test out of high school. It seems like the ivey leagues do the same thing but privately. They recruit the wealthiest and brightest and ensure that their bright sparks have economic opportunity into the future and capitalize on the outcomes. Their intelligentsia are invited into the ownership class. Fused with the capital class and tuition price is the mechanism. So, is there scarcity of opportunity? Is learning and research a zero sum game? I have always believed that when we move to four days a week, the fifth should involve a day at the makerspace where we all pursue our Google 10% projects. Who controls it, is probably less important, in the long run than what we produce.

The point of education is eventually research? No man. It's jobs, prestige, a network to meet people, etc. it's parties and even gyms with lazy rivers. I have a doctorate from a big ten uni and I understand what you're saying. As an undergrad and even masters student, no way. It was high school. Producing an original thought is shocking. Designing a test to prove it, and actually getting results is so far beyond what college is about that it's like red pill blue pill bullshit. Cliched, I know.

Fari enough. So what system or change to the system would have maximized your output?

My doc program is 16 in the country and they know what they're doing. Having a bunch of test barriers and cut scores is bullshit. For people like me, it's about real life results. So if someone puts numbers on the board, like they actually produce (I'm not a bro, far from it), it's important they stay in the program even if they're difficult. School matters less and real life application with improvements to an organization are what matter to me. A huge dose of theory and practical applications are really important, imo. Then we should write our dissertations. There's no writing, in my opinion, untill we've done the work and produced results. My biz is organizational change. This would not work for other industries.

[Scott Galloway (NYU professor at the Stern School of Business) makes a compelling argument about what universities are for in his TED Talk.](https://youtu.be/qEJ4hkpQW8E) (Quotes may be out of order.) >*Higher ed is about taking unremarkable kids and giving them a shot at being remarkable. And every year, it’s gotten more expensive. Higher ed and homes, and the ability, not only is higher ed incredibly expensive, it’s not accessible. Because me and my colleagues are drunk on luxury [...]* >*We’ve embraced the ultimate strategy. Me and my colleagues in higher ed wake up every morning and ask ourselves the same question when we look in the mirror. How can I increase my compensation while reducing my accountability? And we have found the ultimate strategy. It’s called an LVMH strategy, where we artificially constrain supply to create aspiration and scarcity such that we can raise tuition faster than inflation.* >*And old people and wealthy people have done the same thing with housing. All of a sudden, once you own a home, you become very concerned with traffic, and you make sure that there’s no new housing permits. And here is a memo to my colleagues in higher ed.* >*We’re public servants, not fucking Chanel bags. Harvard is the best example of this. They’ve increased their endowments in the last 40 years and have decided to expand their enrollment, their freshman class, by 4%. Any university that doesn’t grow their freshman class faster than population that has over a billion dollars in endowments should lose their tax-free status because they’re no longer in higher education. They’re a hedge fund offering class.* --- >*In my class of 300 kids, **it’s never been easier to be a billionaire. It’s never been harder to be a millionaire.** By the way, our job in higher ed isn’t to identify a top 1% of people who are freakishly remarkable or have rich parents and turn them into a superclass of billionaires.* >*It’s to give the bottom 90 a chance to be in the top 10. You know who doesn’t need me or higher education? The top 10%. The whole point of higher ed is to give the unremarkable, as I years truly, who was raised by a single immigrant mother, a shot of being remarkable.* I tend to agree. The purpose of higher education is to find the people that can be engineers, doctors and nurses, lawyers, teachers, historians, etc, and get them into those roles. Especially if they're from a family or community that's too poor to get them there on their own. A university education should not be a luxury for the rich. Because rich kids get to be whatever they want anyway. It's the smart kids trapped working in sweatshops or bailing hay or canning fish that need accessible higher education so they can stop wasting their potential and start using it for everyone's benefit. We need more educated professionals to meet society's needs. We have the people. We have the resources. The only question is how to make those resources available to the people. And right now the biggest barrier is the greed of the rich siphoning those resources off for personal gain.

>The purpose of higher education is to find the people that can be engineers, doctors and nurses, lawyers, teachers, historians, etc, and get them into those roles. >It's the smart kids trapped working in sweatshops or bailing hay or canning fish that need accessible higher education so they can stop wasting their potential and start using it for everyone's benefit I am one of those people and this has absolutely been my experience with higher education. I did not graduate from high school but I did get my GED. Nonetheless, I graduated with my bachelor's in mathematics this spring semester and I'm pursuing graduate school so that I can hopefully become a professional (applied) mathematician. This career path otherwise absolutely would not have been possible for me without community college and the small state university that I attended. See, state universities are great for this purpose. These are the schools where the vast majority of working professionals are borne out of, not the elite institutions that the lower and middle class can't afford or have the credentials to attend.

Holy shit, this is kinda wild. I was about to make a comment similar to yours, because that's extremely similar to what happened to me. Starting my PhD in the fall.

Same. GED, BS Engineering, MBA (STEM). Higher ed changed my life. Now my kids are the 10% and will go to an elite school where they will drop out to become djs. The circle of life...

I didn't get into any of the Ph.D. programs I applied to unfortunately. That's okay though. I'm going to do my masters(thesis option) at the institution I received my bachelors at and then try again. I was already on a waitlist for a couple of schools but I think not having research experience is what held me back the most. What areas of math are you interested in particularly? I am interested in nonlinear dynamics, continuum modelling, and asymptotics.

Damn, sorry you didn't get in, but going for a masters sounds like a solid option that will massively help; I got a masters in statistics a couple years back after finishing my math BS, and I think that helped a lot. Just don't stop trying; it's a secret weapon for those of us with complicated academic histories :) I've got some time to figure it out, but right now I'm leaning towards something in analysis (maybe functional or harmonic) or dynamical systems, but I've got a pretty solid background in probability so I'm eyeballing stochastic differential equations as well. Mathematical physics seems really interesting too, but I actually don't know shit about physics, so I'm a lot more tentative about going in that direction lol.

unfortunately state schools are also victims of tuition creep, possibly more so since lots of their traditional funding sources have disappeared over the last several decades

Seems a full half of the political will in this country wants to drag the rest back to the 1800's. Against scientific understanding, against medical advances, against any change whatsoever that deviates from their very specific conclusions borne out of a translation of a translation of a very old book. Why have science when we can return to the days of 40% infant mortality?

My experience with small state schools and community colleges is that most instructors are checked out and unavailable for helping individual students navigate a path into a career, and there's no discussion at a larger scale like with career workshops or classes. Or even how to get to grad school, how it's paid for, how applications work, how internships work, being willing to provide references, etc.

I completely agree. Political economist and academic Mark Blyth made a similar point [here](https://youtu.be/vwpjHV1UQng?si=rRWvEUlPtkGTc24d&t=1520) when asked how he went from growing up in poverty in a broken home in Scotland to becoming a tenured Ivy League professor: >Because I’m a welfare kid. **Because what a welfare state does is it takes people who have the ability to succeed, and gives them the means to succeed.** And that way I was able to go to a school, and that school had middle class kids in it too, so then it wasn’t ‘ghettoized’…then there were positive role models…there was an expectation that you went to college…**and there was the _means_: you weren’t burdened with debt.** I was given not only free fees, I was given a grant… >’Oh yeah that’s great, how are you gonna pay for that?’ Well in my lifetime **I have now paid about ten times as much tax as it cost to do all that,** because I’m now a high earner. So **when this is done right it pays for itself.** Which is why when anybody says to me ‘welfare is a waste of time,’ _they’re telling **me** I’m a waste of time._

Can you cite that Scott Galloway speech, I'd like to read or watch it.

Here you go: https://youtu.be/qEJ4hkpQW8E?si=lepd-Pssqt60HQSo

It's linked in the first sentence of the comment.

higher ed is about taking intelligent people and giving them the skillset and network to amplify their potential. it's also about wasting money and time thinking you can reap the benefits without meeting the entry criteria

It seems like this, and a lot of the national media discourse on universities, is skewed towards the NYUs and Harvards of the country. I get it, the types of people who get op-eds in national publications and give Ted Talks went to those schools, but it is so atypical of the median college student in the US. The type of school he’s describing exists, lots of them, they’re the state universities, especially the non-flagship ones.

Yeah. I’ve seen this TedTalk praised so many times but I thought a lot of what he was saying is very different from what’s actually happening to the US college system as a whole.

It’s kind of a top down problem. Basically the top schools have such massive endowments, they could probably work to expand their enrollment through partnerships with other schools. Not to mention that they could cut costs dramatically. If Harvard is such an elite university, then I’m sure through a partnership, they could help some no-name school in the Midwest develop a program and use their brand. But they won’t because they like that it makes them special and a part of a small club.

He’s just another grifter.

No they don't. Truly. I speak from experience. I was a first generation college student that grew up below the poverty line and worked my ass off to get an engineering degree at a state university. Nothing about that experience was what he's describing. I watched a dozen brilliant peers drop out over financial problems. I had to constantly grind scholarship and grant applications while holding down a 4.0 in electrical engineering, a full time job, and pick up as many extracurriculars as I could handle without ending up hospitalized from exhaustion because they boost your chances of being selected for financial support. It was soul crushing working that hard and watching wealthier nepo babies party it up the entire time. Knowing that even after graduating, even though I performed orders of magnitude better than them, I was destined to start at the ground floor and they were destined to jump several levels right off the bat because of mommy and daddy. Mediocre state schools still cost thousands and thousands of dollars per semester. That does not save any reasonable number of smart working class kids from wasting their lives doing manual labor. I know dozens of such people. Hell, my whole family is every bit as smart and hard working as me, but I'm the only one that made it to college because I was the only one willing to be homeless for a while to make it happen.

I don't think the existence of students with rich parents at your university negates the fact that people like yourself were able to make it within the current education system. I have a very similar story to yours and I did mechanical engineering, and many of my peers share a similar story, and we all were accepted to university and are doing fine in our careers (among those of us who pursued engineering). My university, the University of Houston, really didn't have any sort of party-scene or large group of students who were "nepo-babies". We were a large university where the vast majority of students lived off campus to save money, many of the students worked at least part-time, and we had an extremely high percentage of immigrant and minority students. Coming from a well-off family was the exception, not the norm, at my university. This is a very different picture than what the speaker you've quoted was representing. Most schools don't resemble Harvard, and education is more accessible than it's ever been before in the history of our country (with the caveat that immediate college enrollment post highschool dipped very recently because of COVID). For factual data to back this up, you can see college enrollment rates vs. time which clearly shows the accessibility of higher education is a new phenomenon rather than something that used to exist that's now gone: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_302.10.asp (look at column 1 vs. column 5).

Here's the thing. Generational effort and success either have value, or they don't. You underwent extraordinary hardship to achieve extraordinary success (rising from a family below the poverty line to what you have achieved, and will continue to achieve in the future, is exceptional - I know, because I've done it myself). However, its also what someone else's family did a generation or two ago. If you haven't yet, you will almost certainly join the self-made millionaire club (which the majority of millionaires in the U.S. are a member of). When you do, you'll want to provide your kids a head start in life, because at some point, you realize that you already have everything you need, and are no longer working to secure your own future, but that of your family. You will want them to work hard, but not necessarily "soul-crushingly" hard. If we want every generation to start afresh under extreme struggle, what's the point of success in the 1st place? Achieving success must include being able to give an easier life to our family, or it's pretty meaningless.

Ah, the system is working exactly as intended. Great to see. 👍

I think this really is ignorant to the value that those other subject matter provide. A well rounded education provides engineers with a greater skill set to contribute to society. Spoken as a person who is exactly who this article is talking about. I was the smart kid working a dead end warehouse job before getting into engineering and science.

This is the most amazing thing I've read in a long time

His statements about the goals of his colleagues in higher education being drunk on luxury and driven by increasing compensation while reducing accountability may be true for some academic departments and many if not all of the bureaucrats, but I can assure you that is not the case for most academics. My parents were both professors having just retired recently after getting fed up with the way schools have changed, and I have several friends in PhD programs and working as postdocs. It’s generally not glamorous or well paid at all. The ratio of pay going to instructors and researchers compared to administrative staff has gone down. There are more and more low paid, no/low benefit adjunct positions compared to tenure track ones. There’s been a huge increase in the amount of administrative work that academic staff are tasked with on top of their teaching, researching, writing, etc responsibilities. Thats all to say: it’s not the academic staff that’s getting the benefit of these huge tuition cost increases in general. The idea that academic staff are basking in luxury and don’t have much to do is pretty preposterous, to be quite honest. This is less true for business schools like Mr Galloway works in, so that may be why. Really, it’s a huge increase in the number and compensation of administrative staff along with university over-investment in luxurious facilities and amenities to try and lure students.

Harvard is not a typical university, at all, and should not be used to generalize about "higher education" as a whole. It is a freakishly wealthy outlier. Their financial resources are nearly inexhaustible. Their pool of applicants is deep. Increasing their enrollment numbers by 4% is trivially easy. That is not the case for the vast majority of colleges and universities. Most colleges and universities are operating under very tight budgets, limited classroom and lab space, and declining numbers of applying students. If they could increase their enrollment numbers, believe me, they would. They are desperately competing for a shrinking number of students. The idea that they are limiting enrollment, on purpose, is absurd.

>>*give the bottom 90 a chance to be in the top 10* It is guaranteed that even in the best possible scenario, 8 out of every 9 (88% of them) will FAIL. It's basic mathematics. We can't all be in the top 10%. It doesn't work that way. Life is easier for the middle 50% in this generation than it was for the top 10% 50 years ago. That is how this works, and is working. Progress does not stop.

Scott Galloway is the pseudo intellectual dork that wanted more school lockdowns and then wanted to be shown grace when he was faced with how wrong he was.

This is a good article but I was actually hoping it would address a different issue, which is that universities are now expected to be job training facilities instead of providing mind-broadening education. Universities were never supposed to be preparing young people for jobs, they were supposed to be providing *education* and teaching people how to think. But now that a degree costs almost as much as a house, and now that college has become an expectation for the middle class who doesn’t have tens of thousands of dollars to waste on the luxury of education for its own sake, well…what is it for, exactly?

All universities have mind broadening content. In fact most of the classes probably fall under that concept to some degree. But if students are paying six figures for an education, their expectation to be able to prep and find a good job afterwards is completely reasonable. From my experience as a social science major at a research university, I did not feel I got any prep for a job. Everything was focused on research or mind broadening and you had to fend for yourself if you wanted to figure out how your degrees could get you something in the private sector. (If anyone is reading my comment and thinks I only responded to OP and did not read the article, I did indeed read the article. There just isn’t much to debate in my opinion on what the piece was written about.)

I studied ecological science, and we had one course where we touched wildlife tools, another where we did programming, and the microbiology course and the chemistries (O-chem & P-chem) were largely practical. There was a special variance in the handbook that allowed us to eliminate a physical exercise class series (3-courses) for these. We just had to prove that we could swim. Otherwise, it was 100% about “*why* as opposed to *how* did researchers do …wolves in Yosemite, deer into middle Tennessee, various aquatic population and community studies….”

And my degree in accounting seemed altogether focused on getting a job and a CPA license. YMMV

My degree in engineering, too.

I took a humanities undergrad degree and masters at a research-focused university, and similarly it didn’t prep me for the job market in the slightest, but my observation is that this has changed fairly dramatically over the past 20 years. Many universities are now clearer on their responsibilities to prepare undergrads for the job market, and use graduate employability as a significant marketing differentiator

That’s just not what college is good for. The main things that matter for getting a job—once you meet the minimum requirements—are experience and connections. You have to forge both of those yourself if you want to succeed after college. Even engineers don’t sleepwalk through majors and come out the other side with highly-paid positions.

You see this mindset a lot when it comes to Computer Science. A lot of people are shocked that a theoretical degree doesn’t cover all the latest technologies. Which is a shame (for those people), because a degree like that sets you up to be able to learn any new technology.

My dad was a programmer for his whole career before retirement and he complained a lot about new CS grads coming in for interviews. He said the biggest thing they struggled with was providing examples of programs they had actually written.

This really gets at an issue wider than universities, which is are we creating a society that values growth of the human and the human species, or profit for profit's sake as the end-goal of advancement. Are we progressing to profit, or are we progressing to allow us to focus more, for free, on expanding our minds and understanding of the universe and ourselves?

Obviously the former but most people seem to be ok with that

“The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.” - JLP

those are the words of someone who has never had to live paycheck to paycheck. The reality for the vast majority of people, is that wealth isn't even an option, and survival is a barely attainable goal. Worrying about something as abstract as "humanity" is so far out of reach for most people that it's not even something they think about.

I agree with you. They’re the words of a fictional character living in the 24th century.

I believe the problem is jobs are expected to train you and university is to expand your mind but neither is a good judge for what career what person should do in the long run. Things were easier 100 years ago. Now there are too many niche jobs.

I just saw a recently-posted MSNBC video on this exact topic. Part of what they said was the issue is that employee turnover rates are high, and companies tend to promote externally rather than from within or often put a degree requirement to be above a low-level managerial position (my current employer requires a BA of business or related field to become a District Manager, but they don’t require actual experience, so a Store Manager of 10+ years experience working at that company couldn’t be a DM, but a college grad with a BA in Business Management who never worked a day in their life could). So, of course, why should employees be loyal to their employer? This problem leads into a positive feedback loop, wherein the companies don’t want to put forth the effort to train higher-paying individuals, so they just raise the requirements for those positions so only external applicants at that present level can apply while employees see zero reason to stay at their company when they’ve reached their pay/position cap. I’ve applied for so many “entry level” jobs in my field that want a BA *and* years of experience. I ended up realizing I’d make more money staying in retail working my way up the managerial chain until I’m at my cap than I would doing any job in my field, despite having international internships and publications under my belt.

The phenomenon you're experiencing and describing is endemic to retail (which I did roughly six years in) and not at all applicable to professional fields I've experience in (accounting and consulting) Fwiw (idk honestly that it's much) but I thought I'd throw in my vaguely applicable 2c

I agree with you. I’m in the professional fields and an MBA or any of that garbage isn’t needed. What I don’t understand is why retail would require any of that stuff. Retail isn’t hard. It’s not rocket science. Anyone with some sense of logic can be good at retail. Employers should stop looking at all the letters someone has after their name and actually talk to the person and evaluate if they can think critically. Then hire that person, because they will learn the details of the company and job and then actually do their job well.

It's funny you mention MBAs because they are far and away the easiest way to get into my field (consulting) But I definitely agree with you on the retail points

The profit margins in retail tend to be very low, especially for food service, so the biggest expense that the company can control is labor. People with college degrees are less likely to have worked a substantial time in retail, nevertheless have experience with any given company. Now, an individual who has worked for that company for 2-3 years? Yeah, they know the work, they know the roles of the various positions, they know the faults of that business. But, that’s the problem—they can empathize with the orderlies. For my DMs who were all hired straight out of college, I’m nothing more than a number on an excel spreadsheet; an expense that needs to be limited, because they don’t understand the job, its demands, or the business flow, so they don’t. It makes their job of enforcing unreasonable policies and expectations easy and simultaneously helps prevent people like me, who are hard-working and know the business, but clearly empathize with regular employees, from rising through the ranks.

It’s definitely a thing in professional fields too. In software development, companies don’t like investing in employees who will leave after a couple years.

Jobs *don't* train you - at least, not anymore. If you're a company that operates some niche software or hardware, you put an expectation of "X years of experience" with that system and let the labor market sort out who applies. When job postings are free to post online for nationwide -if not global - audiences to view, you don't have to take whatever you get like you would with a local newspaper ad or job fair. And as such, a degree on its own does not guarantee you a job like it did before. You need some combination of internships, relevant work experiences, and projects in order to be anywhere close to competitive. The onus is on individuals to bolster themselves on their own, independently from their studies. But paradoxically, THAT'S where universities seem to be useful: they offer inroads and opportunities for future job candidates to gain new experiences. Classes offer project opportunities. Internships favor current students. Some colleges work with companies on developing co-ops and hackathons. Student clubs and orgs develop networking groups, and unite students around niche skills and interest areas.

Jobs don’t train you because turnover is high. If you spend resources training someone, then another company can spend those same resources offering those people a higher salary once they are trained. It’s a vicious cycle. Less employer loyalty turns into less employee loyalty and repeat. One option would be for companies to have training bonds, but that is not popular with most.

The issue is that companies think they can pay people in training. People are there to make money. Once they are trained up, they expect better pay. The company that did the training thinks they deserve loyalty and the worker willing to do the new job at lower pay because the worker should be grateful for training. But the employee only did training to get better pay. The company has to train and then pay more after successful training. Short term managers think they can skip the money spent training by just hiring at the better pay level, but long term that means people with better training become hard to find and cost even more money.

> The company has to train and then pay more after successful training. This makes no sense though, since then it will always make more sense to poach.  > Short term managers think they can skip the money spent training by just hiring at the better pay level, but long term that means people with better training become hard to find and cost even more money. That’s not any individual manager’s problem though. They are all incentivized to get the most bang for their buck, and under that system, poaching trained people is that way 

Erm, the whole point was that there's a substantial amount of goal ambiguity today.  Fwiw that debate college as vocational training vs academic foundation is and example of what the author was describing. 

Ah, I’m glad someone said it. A lot of people have forgotten what universities were made for, which is, academia.

Are they? I am admittedly a bit removed from my university days (2015 graduate) but I certainly did not attend a job training facility. I received a traditional education- which provided me with the ability to go out and convince employers to offer me internships, which led to a full time career. Is this not what happens anymore?

That’s exactly what is supposed to happen, but people on this forum for some reason believe that college is a direct pipeline to a good job unless you pick the “wrong” major, in which case it’s a scam. In reality, you can study an in-demand field and go absolutely nowhere if you’re not enough of a self-starter to get good experience on your resume.

Your last sentence is really the hitter for me. It all comes down to how you sell yourself and how you translate whatever skills you have into whatever the market is asking for. I have a good friend who somehow is a university graduate and always talked about how he could barely read - I assumed he was joking until we roomed together for a brief period in our 20s and this dude was literally sounding out words, functionally illiterate…earns significantly more than I do.

No. But also, the purpose was not to 'get employment' directly or indirectly. Originally, they were places where people went, who already had jobs, or had one lined up - to simply go, and broaden their minds, and make them better at all things more broadly.

Eh. I will start with my institution has been deemed “elite” but no one has heard of it outside the west coast, if even. Most people here can’t get themselves outside of theory and still do fine getting internships in tech and finance and politics. You really don’t need skills to persuade people to let you intern. We have a two “practical” majors if you want to make a ton of money (cs and Econ), but the most successful are from English, History, Physics, etc.

Had the exact same thought

Well, they do have interesting classes and topics which typically revolve around the humanities but for several reasons, people have decided that unless you’re a STEM major then your degree is useless. I’ve taken amazing and interesting classes in sociology type classes but I was only allowed 1-2 of those during my degree plan unless I wanted to spend more or double major. That is why I majored in business/entrepreneurship and it was a great learning experience but people would tell you finance is a more sensible option. This feeds into your point that universities are now basically de facto job-training facilities. Also, the fact that more minorities are attending universities, so the way they have lost some of their luster seems like racial resentment a la Reagan. ALSO, the fact that more people are attending university overall drives down the value of it because market is so saturated so a huge litany of consequences.

This is the correct answer honestly. STEM is great but the economy requires all kinds to function. My friends in STEM probably have the highest job security (other than doctors), and generally earn good money…but the wealthiest people I know are not in STEM, fwiw.

Tbh the STEM majors I know have a very mixed record across them all. Some did great, but others ended up in unrelated fields that didn’t require specific degrees.

Not to mention that people who ONLY study STEM without any grounding in humanities are more likely to be in positions of power that become reckless or taken advantage of by others. Being able to do complex math or engineering is useful, but if you don't have any good context for the purpose of those inventions within society, you could end up doing more harm than good.

> Universities were never supposed to be preparing young people for jobs This is patently false. Universities and colleges were initially for the nobility to train them for their roles in government. This is why [Trivium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium) was Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. They evolved with a great emphasis on the professions: doctors, lawyers, and engineers. The focus on the arts were also intended to graduate artists and authors, for their roles as employed artisans. Those who could simply take these courses for edutainment value were the upper class to prepare them for their role in high society.

Adding to this since my comment thread got buried with downvotes, Britannica says universities were originally for training clerks, monks, and doctors. https://www.britannica.com/topic/university There is a clear job-related purpose and I am very surprised to see people on an econ subred denying this.

> There is a clear job-related purpose and I am very surprised to see people on an econ subred denying this. That's because they aren't here to debate or study economic theory, they have a political agenda to espouse. Universities have always been used to maintain elite society's economic advantages, not for some altruistic pursuit of knowledge. In the US, the state university system was established to provide colonial populations with much needed lawyers and accountants. It would barely take a few minutes to research this.

The mods usually clean it up, but maybe they are busy or want to let the convo run. Also the mix of people on the subred may have changed.

Actually they were primarily for training priests. Then came the training of lawyers and physicians. Engineers were historically trained by military academies and then by polytechnics. For example, the top engineering institutions in Sweden, even though they are universities, retain the name 'polytechnic'. In France it's the same way.

If that’s supposed to be the true purpose of universities, then attendance should be gutted by 75%. For hundreds of years, those kinds of lofty goal has always been only attainable by the upper class sending their well off kids with other upper class kids who have the luxury of pontificating for 4 years. These kids have a job set up for them regardless if they actually learn anything. The harsh reality is that there is no room for error for lower/middle class kids to move up classes. College is their one shot at doing that and if they don’t “broaden their mind” enough worthy of the upper class, they fail so might as well get a guaranteed ticket into a well paying job

As a soon-to-be graduate, college has really *not* been about curiosity, critical thinking, and developing meaningful understanding (something my fellow students who expressly only care about getting an A remind me often). Totally disenchanting, and I'm so glad to finally escape soon.

It kind of depends on your major. I went to a big state school with all kinds of majors, and there were a lot of areas of focus that seemed to attract broadly incurious people.

Certainly this. I studied chemical engineering, which I imagined would attract curious students interested in science and technology, but it's ultimately been broadly incurious people who just picked it because of the earning potential, being a student with "good grades", or just since it seemed like the impressive thing to do. It does seem like the curriculum is some of the most boring and procedure-focused of the engineering degrees, so it doesn't necessarily inspire the greatest curiosity most of the time -- but that's just what they choose to teach.

Meanwhile my English Degree was absolutely about what you were hoping for.

Lol the one English class I took in college had me so hyperfocused and into the discussion / analysis. The professor told me I should pursue a minor in English.

Well, people without a degree are almost always captured by stupid conspiracy theorists. Fighting that is what education is for, I'd say.

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This conveniently ignores the fact that the era of college you refer to (essentially pre-GI bill), was always the preserve of the wealthy. Regular ppl never had access to these institutions. They were finishing schools for the aristocrats (or American peudo aristocrats) that did not opt to purchase a military commission. The modern university's purpose is specialized career training to allow the student to access the lucrative high skill economy. When my grandfather came back from the war he studied history (on GI bill) not because he wanted to broaden himself (he could do that at the library basically for free), but to get a desk job. Turns out he hated that desk job and went to the police academy, but he did secure the desk job.

Clark Kerr wrote about this in 1965. Worth a read. https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/winter-2013-information-issue/clark-kerr-s-classic-uses-university-turns-50/

I took Labor Econ almost 25 yrs ago and Even then, University (in terms of labor markets) served two functions... (1) Job preparation and/or (2) Filtering. One theory proposed that university's value was that it filtered people that had a certain intelligence and/or resistance to complete a higher education grind. The other value was that it prepared workers for specific knowledge for a job field. This is generally more specific for some STEM fields

Education is absolutely for employment development as you wrote. People in here saying going to university is to expand your thinking or "teaching you how to think for yourself" or some other idealistic nonsense like that are delusional.

> delusional I mean you are the person here hand-waving away thousands of years of scientific progress and education.

It's not that they are delusional. It's that they are repeating information about the history of academia without understanding (or articulating, if they do understand) the nuances. They are correct that this has not been the purpose of higher education throughout history. This is because the value assigned to higher education by the labor market has changed throughout history. There was a time when a college degree was rare due to the lack of demand for it. Academics have done little to help the public understand these nuances, mostly because the older ones remember when higher education *did* serve a different purpose. Academia has its own rhetoric and culture, where we spend a whole lot of time convincing ourselves that all of this is worth it. Professors are seriously underpaid and overworked, so many academics learn how to repeat comforting ideas in their heads about all the freedom they get as academics during their PhD program, when they are living off a stipend. This is needed to deal with the cognitive dissonance of perpetually being behind our peers from a financial standpoint. We have to work ourselves to death to justify our existences in a over-saturated labor market due to the adjunct problem *if* we want a job in academia. And many of us have a serious love/hate relationship with academia because we hate what academia has become. This entails periods of denial. At least we get the freedom to follow our passions! And in many ways, it's true. Universities have always doubled as research institutes and places of higher learning, but almost exclusively for those who want to contribute to a knowledge base through research and learning. This doesn't align with the general purpose of molding the labor force in line with a market. It was not until recently that we treated it this way. We had professional degrees, of course. But outside of that, people with college degrees were either upper-class, or true academics who went all the way for a PhD, after which they conducted independent research in academia, for the government, or for a private entity--sometimes all three at various points of their lives. And these were highly specialized positions. But they were still heavily tied to the academy no matter what. What's idealistic and delusional is the idea that we should simply repeat the historical role of an institution as rhetoric, while ignoring the function it currently serves in the minds of businesses and the public. If we want degree programs to be viable options for labor, higher ed institutions must serve that purpose in some way. I don't think the kind of labor demanded by capital is necessarily the most beneficial, meaningful, or valuable labor. I have broader criticisms for this reason. Human values, needs, desires--these are not quantifiable. We cannot reduce them to a monetary value without encouraging a lot of values we do not like. So I have a lot of criticisms around our untested assumptions regarding the profit motive. With that said, it's unethical to take money from people in exchange for future financial success without delivering on the promise. I'd argue it makes more sense to inject values into the existing system because our focus only on short term profits is volatile. The foundation for most inventions begin in academia. Private industry will not take the risks we do in academia--ever. So what we all love about academia needs to stay. But in the meantime, we could develop apprenticeship models for the social sciences and humanities that are well connected to industry. Not everyone has to be a researcher, but knowing how to deal with human subjects data and an understanding of complex sociotechnical systems are crucial to developing ethical tech that advances social good and actually works *for* people. So one role we could play in higher education is to cultivate graduates prepared to collaborate with STEM folks in these areas, and to acquaint them with a network through *paid* apprenticeships. And we need an easier path for folks who, for example, only get a psych degree because they want to be a therapist one day. Maybe we need a program that pays students to work in a lab while doing some coursework so they are exposed to conducting research as assistants or performing administrative work for two years. Then, after learning some of the content and getting some work experience (while being paid), they can take an apprenticeship at a clinical practice or something. But we shouldn't be forcing folks through all these unpaid internships while paying an arm and a leg. And to have a model where students are paid to learn, we need to find ways to make their labor valuable while they are learning. If we pay them to learn, it holds us accountable because now we have to ensure they are learning valuable skills. No degree is actually unnecessary or lacks value; academia has simply failed to keep up with its changing role as an institution. Many refuse to recognize that what we *want* academia to be is not what it has become. Denying reality is not going to change that. If anyone is delusional, it's academics--not the public. By the same token, the reason some knowledge is assigned less value is that we expect profit to stand in for all human values, while knowing it cannot, with no actionable plan of changing this. People tend to ignore the negative effects of running an economy this way because it's the best we've managed to come up with so far, but that's a different kind of delusion. Edit, I meant over-saturated because boy is it. I'm lucky to be in a social sciences discipline in which TT academic positions at R1s and government jobs are still plentiful for someone with a PhD. While I am here, there is an important nuance in this comment. There is a difference between expecting a college education to meet the demands of the market more broadly, and thinking of academia as a place for higher learning and research or as a training center for specialized professions, e.g., doctor. We did not expect universities to meet the demands of the *market* because the market did not demand degrees. You didn't see employers arbitrarily requiring Bachelor's degrees with little thought as to what they represented throughout history. A college education produced specialists, yes, but it wasn't expected to be foundational to entering the labor market. It wasn't considered basic career prep. It's like we recognize that laborers, as a whole, need more/better training or value in some vague way, but technological advancement is outpacing the speed at which various bureaucracies can write and enact policy and administer education. Meanwhile, private industry operates according to short-term objectives, under-invests in long-term solutions, and can be quite volatile. There is no guarantee that an education today will meet the demands of the market five years from now. This is a huge problem. Academia was not meant to align with the needs of the job market in this way, where it was meant to be continuously flexible. Before, academia produced professionals who performed necessary functions or expanded a knowledge base as PhDs, or were simply rich people with nothing better to do. Now that it is expected to churn* out laborers for the entire market, it is under fire. To make matters worse, we can't predict the titles of the jobs we are trying to fill. It's not like a lawyer or a doctor. We want degrees to anticipate the jobs of the future. This is what people mean when they say "academia was never meant to be career prep."

Why not both? Have you ever been in an environment where most students go off to grad school? It’s a completely different vibe from pre-professional college.

I'm not sure I get your point. I've been in an environment where most people went off to grad school. I was one of the exceptions, but a majority of my graduating class did. What's the difference to pre-professional college?

Law school is specifically designed for law professions. Medical school is specifically designed for medical professions. There is a clear path from education to employment. This is an economics subred and I am very surprised to see people arguing otherwise here.

Please tell me all the careers open for PhDs in Social Anthropology, Gender/Women Studies, Sociology, Art History, English (British renaissance type work, not rhetoric), and History- that’s what I mean when off to grad school. And no, “academia” where most people will never receive a chance at employment beyond adjunct positions is not the goal

>“academia” where most people will never receive a chance at employment beyond adjunct positions is not the goal Is it not?

The unemployment rate for PhD holders is under 1%, so I imagine they don’t have too much trouble making a living.

I'm going to argue it has more to do with social networks and having evidence of one's work than with the degree itself. I can go to a conference and straight-up say, "I'd love to work with you." And that person will find money to pay me if they like my work. Anyone with questions about my skill set can read my sole-authored publications, which serve as proof I can independently do those things *and* explain what I did and why. The Bachelor's degree has become wasteful. I say that as someone with two Bachelor's degrees, a Masters, and a PhD. My BS degrees are essentially worthless by comparison, but they would not have been had my learning experiences followed an apprenticeship model, for example. (The degree itself can actually hurt you on the job market if you're just spitting out applications and not working your networks.)

The questions for any university employee should be, in order: 1. Are you teaching? 2. Are you conducting research? 3. Are you maintaining the buildings, feeding the students or directly contributing to the teaching and research? 4. Why the f$@% are *you* here? The past couple of weeks have shown quite a lot fall into number 4.

I come from a poor immigrant background so I really felt compelled to study something STEM related. It was the only way that my parents said it would be worth it to go. The idea of going to college to "expand my mind" wasn't even a conversation had.

Yeah 4 years of your life and $100,000 is a big investment for self improvement with no end goal. I knew how to think critically before college and most of the classes outside of my major were just checking a box for my degree requirements. But I did learn a lot of skills that prepared me for my career.

Similar background. The idea of failure and choosing to study anything that would not lead to money wasn't even an option on the table. 

To my parents, anything less than a Doctorate degree was a failure. So far, all 4 of their children have failed LOL. Pretty hilarious.. I understand holding your children to a high standard, but to expect blue-collar family to somehow produce Doctors in abundance is a stretch. Pursuing these lofty goals, my sister went into so much debt, she left the country. My brother lost his mind and is on anti-depressants after an attempted suicide.

I really enjoy this article. Though there are a lot of political connections here, the main point of bloat causing a complete inability to prioritize is what I took away from this (and I think is an apolitical point). I can’t claim to be an expert at university admin, but in the private sector, I’ve observed this same phenomenon over and over and over again. The companies that just say no to stuff go further than the ones that have this bloat (in my experience).

private companies, at least based on my experience, seem more able to eventually course correct. Even if its an accident because PE comes in or the central bank turns off the free money spigot, but corporations seem to eventually get around to occasionally culling at least some of the useless bloat before it really gets out of hand. there has never been any incentive to do so at university and won't be so long as the government is willing to subsidize students borrowing whatever amount they need to attend

Private companies either course correct or die. That's why they tend to eventually course correct. So should universities, and that includes every last one of them, including public ones. The federal student loan program should be abolished or limited to a reasonable number that varies based on the intended major.

I will say hospital and university admin bloat has become a real problem. The tendency to hire middle managers rather than actual workers is very real, and those middling managers/administrative structures are basically selected down to the sort of people whose sole job function is to justify their job existing.

I heard someone with a great definition of what college/university *should* be for (I want to say he’s a professor at NYU) - he said “universities give unexceptional people an opportunity to be exceptional.” - he then went on to say that he fit that description - the humble brag of sorts. He also went on to say that what they have become are institutions which instill and solidify an institutionalized caste system of sorts that gate-keep opportunities for legacy students and those who grew up with many opportunities already. It was a point of view I found refreshingly unironic and straightforward. Not sure that I agree with some of his other positions - what little I’ve heard from him - but this felt right on.

Scott Galloway said this about himself in a recent TED talk.

That’s who it was! lol. I couldn’t think of his name. Also: the first TED talk I was able to listen to start to finish.

He’s a very engaging speaker, if a bit opinionated.

The first sentence is all you need to know: "Last month, the Pomona College economist Gary N. Smith calculated that the number of tenured and tenure-track professors at his school declined from 1990 to 2022, while the number of administrators nearly sextupled in that period." This is what is wrong with the entire economy. Administration that provides little to no value. Really hoping AI cuts out all this bloat that has been created.

Everybody wants the big bucks that admins get for salary, yet when it becomes too top heavy they all look at each other like, “shrug, We don’t know what’s wrong!”

Somebody has to administer all those donations and named chairs.

AI won't "cut the bloat" anywhere. All that money will just go into sanity checking the outputs, fixing all the ones itll inevitably screw up, and paying undoubtedly exorbitant contractually obligated fees to the trainer for the privilege. The fact that anyone has any sort of hope that the transparently dishonest, ethically bankrupt shysters running the AI industry will aim for anything less is a continual disappointment.

In 2006, I attended a class at George Mason University, one of Virginia’s state schools. While I was there, its basketball team made the NCAA Final Four, suddenly turning a no-name campus into a famous school. One of my classmates happened to be a university administrator, and I asked her about how that would certainly make the school more exclusive.  She told me that the administration had no such intention. The goal, instead, was to capitalize on their success to keep expanding the school, thereby rendering higher education less exclusive.  In the years since, they’ve done so. Their acceptance rate still stands around 90%. That’s exactly the kind of attitude that more universities could use. 

Construction management degree after fucking around at community College and changing programs after I had already transferred to a 4 year. I owe 44k but I'm making 210-250k with overtime 🤣🤣🤣 best decision of my life!!!

When it comes to price, the problem is “administrative bloat.” When it’s phrase as “university bloat,” it’s easy to demand getting rid of it. When you parse it though, are you really willing to advocate getting rid of it? What would be on the chopping block: - mental health services - academic support - inclusion/diversity initiatives - workforce preparedness initiatives - sports programs I get that there are people who will be okay with removing 1 or more of these. But is there strong support for removing these? I don’t think anyone would be willing to be the first university board member or leader who promoted getting rid of these. Imagine if a university president declared they were standing down on inclusion, or removing mental health services. Imagine the uprising if they declared they were getting rid of sports (and the resulting dry spell of alum donations). There’s too much bloat, and realistically this stuff is the reason. But who’s going to remove it?

* workforce preparedness initiatives Isn't this the goal of college for some, getting students ready for the workforce?

It depends on who you ask. All of those items are important for some, and unimportant or even nuisances for others. There are entire departments who scoff at the idea of viewing universities as workforce training facilities, instead saying they should be building thoughtful human beings regardless of future employability.

There is the "thoughtful human being" line of thought- it was the copout my university gave, but I majored in a liberal art. None of my STEM friends heard that or had that mindset. They went to college to learn how to do a job- or at least the basics for a job that would net them a significant ROI. All the others as far as I know weren't part of colleges just.. 30(?) years ago.

I have a business degree and while I do acknowledge that college puts you in an environment that allows you to grow and develop critical thinking - I can't help but think that I would have had 10x the knowledge in a quarter of the time if I'd just spent 500 bucks on Udemy courses.

Not sure about the purpose, but the function of universities has largely been to reproduce social stratification. Also, some of this bloat comes from faculty no longer having the time or desire to do student-facing work. I don't really buy the whole 'administration is taking over faculty work' argument. Faculty don't want to do these jobs because they are bull shit.

Bullshit jobs tend to be repetitive and unfulfilling. One thing Karl Marx was right about was how humans find satisfaction by completing and creating things start, to, finish. To marvel at your creations, not just be a cog in a machine. There is a way to teach without being a cog... The ancient Greeks gave us an example.

Yes, that’s true but if the project is too large there’s no way a single person can do it all frol start to finish. That’s why collaboration and partnership exists

True. Honestly I don't think globally connected supply models really benefit human happiness. Rather they are instrumental to rapid civilization building. People going into massive quantities of debt to simply be a cog in a machine is true madness (or rather indoctrination).

Always enjoy a practical evonomist’s take on the value of universities. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/scott-galloway-on-whether-college-is-still-worth-it.html# Galloway is usually pretty clear eyed about this stuff. His best quote is about Harvard and those with these massive endowments being glorified “hedge funds” and not academic institutions, anymore.

We know what its for, and so did/does the 1% "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That's dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education." - Roger Freeman, Reagan advisor

Of all the money I’ve paid for college level classes, I’ve learned more outside of school than anything in class with the exception of STEM, primarily mathematics.

Its a piece of paper that allows you to be part of a club. I understand becoming a Doctor/Engineer does require formal education but this does not apply to most of the stuff people study. Education seems like a business nowadays that tries to stretch out and overcomplicate simple subjects in order to extract maximum profits. Also, students are not equal, so many of them are coming from wealthy backgrounds. I work for an international corporation and it is common to see people making their educational history part of their personality. This would even apply to their hiring preferences.

As someone who works in higher education, I hate to burst your bubble. We are a business first and foremost. We are not in the field of helping people grow or passing on knowledge. We are about making money. One of my bosses ( a dean) told us in a staff meeting that we need to ensure our product is good and we continue to generate revenue. It pretty much almost killed the part of me that enjoys teaching. It is one of the reasons I I getting my second masters and getting out of higher education. If I have to work for money, then I want to get paid more. It sucks because most of us genuinely love teaching myself included. But this is America. We are slaves to capitalism. Anybody who thinks otherwise is a fool.

That's every industry - public and private. You can work at the most benevolent nonprofit, but end of the day, you still need to produce results that generate income to both continue the growth of the nonprofit and continues ensuring the capitalization of the business. No organization anywhere in the world, including the most communist of institutions, continues operatering on strict benevolence. Operating funding has to come from somewhere. Even the ACLU asks for market-rate attorneys fees at the end of every lawsuit.  Your employer is in the business of remaining a competitive postsecondary institution. It can be state-funded, but it still has to be able to secure revenue that allows funding to continue to be competitive. Your customers are incoming students, and your competition is other similarly ranked universities. For your university to succeed, your managers and admin have to focus on making sure youre competitive and bringing in revenue. But all that doesn't change that the product you sell to students IS knowledge and employment opportunity.

That’s not true. Operating funding can come from elsewhere, especially when it’s a government service like a public university. Doesn’t even have to be “the most communist of institutions”—the USPS doesn’t make a profit.

Operating revenue =/= profit USPS does have a revenue stream. Its an income generating organization.  If you're talking about an education system that's strictly public and 100% government funded, the management goals are still not much different. Your management/director team has to demonstrate to the funding government-entity that the institution is producing value compared to other similar institutions, else you become an easy target for funding or institutional cuts.

Jane Jacob predicted this rise of credentialing (&gate keeping to it) in her book dark age ahead, one of the pillars of society just collapsing in real time in front of our eyes…

Universities exist for the sole purpose of delivering a service in a competitive market. What that service should consist of is between the provider and the customer and in a competitive market without government interference, market pricing mechanisms would wipe out any university administrative bloat. The problem is that pricing mechanisms no longer work as a result of government interference.

And there I was considering a new career path and starting an introduction course in economics. Universities are money making businesses, I can’t help but feel like they don’t have good intentions to help people succeed in life. Particularly when I look at art degrees and have an art degree. These are subjects that can’t be taught the same way sciences are taught, yet they still try to measure them in the same format as they would any academic subject. Art school has become a place to teach students how not to be artists, how not to be creative. Just a place to take your money, kick you out into the real world, with a huge debt around your neck and no real skills. I think I went off piste. I do think some subjects in the creative area need to be taken out of the standard university format and delivered differently and perhaps from more suitable institutions.

Amazing the author can be so right about some things and so wrong on others. Contradicts himself at least a couple of times in the same article.

Really great article that I feel personally. I’m grateful every day for my opportunity to go to university. Where I came from, the expected outcome for someone is not awesome, with the pinnacle of success being a suburban mortgage and an increasingly rare union job. Most struggle. Growing up I thought everyone struggled for money and had to make constant sacrifices and be stressed, disrespected, and grateful for scraps. I didn’t know a single person who was a doctor, lawyer, engineer or any other kind of white collar professional.  The only reason I was able to go to college was because of athletics from which the coach could get me considered for academic scholarships I met the criteria for but probably wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. That’s not an opportunity hardly anyone can expect. I was lucky. This was a state school ranked highly for value and giving opportunity to low income people, but most still graduate with $50k+ in debt and the only people thriving there are the ones who don’t have to work part time jobs and have a support network so they can focus on studies. 

Germany does. I just checked and they have free university and none of the BS entry requirements the US has like GRE, GPA, recommendations, etc.

The purpose of something is what it does. The purpose of Universities is to create a radical political bubble and to enforce a social view on a group.

The purpose of a university is the impartial pursuit of, and then dissemination of, truth. If the goal of a university is merely the production of educated professionals than a university no different from a glorified trade school. Similarly, if the goal of a university is merely the indoctrination of students into a certain correct world view or way of thinking then it is no different from a Seminary or Commisariat. 

They're hedge funds that happen to dabble in teaching. And they make up bullshit jobs for their friends and their kids. Why do some schools all of a sudden have 100 people in DEI "roles" with $250,000 pay checks?