I sympathize with this view. When I was young (and foolish), I was really upset at how university education was being commoditized to teach job skills when really it should (in my opinion) follow the Classical Greek model of education designed to better a person -- the word for school also means "leisure". I also bemoaned the lack of intellectual curiosity and anti-intellectual atmosphere in universities, even elite universities.
But over time, I realized that this model of a university where you go and find yourself or discover the truth or become an enlightened person was fundamentally impossible as a method of national policy.
It is an indulgence for the elite which doesn't scale to 70% of the population, most of whom have zero desire to become intellectuals and are going to school so that they can have job skills. They need job skills. Why would we make them take out huge loans or waste a key portion of their lives role playing as intellectuals?
Moreover, it's really hard to teach young people insight about life because most of us are complete fools when we are young and all we get is the feeling of having deep insight into things, we don't really get that insight except by _doing_, whether that means engaging directly with the world via travel or talking to people outside our bubble, reading things that challenge us, experience life by having kids or watching a relative die, or whether that means doing on the job -- secluding yourself into a dream world on a walled off campus with a strictly controlled idealized environment is an indulgence that does not actually make you a more knowledgeable person.
In terms of an elite school offering superior results, that is always easy to do if you are selective. It's trivial to create a high school with much superior results than the average high school if you can pick out good students. The hard thing to do is to scale that to a national policy for everyone.
So if this secluded campus model of the university doesn't promote your intellectual life and it doesn't give you job skills, then why are we doing it?
There is a reason why the original schools were basically theological training institutions and later became finishing schools for the wealthy. That model of university education was always a type of bubble, but at least in the past, people were sent to the bubble because they were going to live in that bubble for the rest of their lives so the university was preparing them for their future life, either in a monastery or in elite circles where employment was considered a dirty word.
You wouldn't, like you weren't paying to do your military service.
> engaging directly with the world via travel or talking to people outside our bubble
A mandatory year mixing all social classes is, by definition, "bubble-popping". In fact this still happens today, when young people are forced to leave their home town they lived all their life in in order to go to the university.
Also, nothing is preventing a university from having some practical workshops... (I know a lot of people that got their truck-driving license during their military service) and a big university should be able to have some much more expensive training machinery than a small school.
P.S.: Oliv(i)er Faron is far from being young and foolish...
Who do you think pays for military service if not the people? Martians? What is the difference between generation X paying for generation X+1's education, spending g% more than what was paid for their own education, and generation X taking out a loan to pay for their education at a rate of r? The only thing that matters is whether r > g, the growth rate of the price of education. If r > g, then a direct transfer is slightly more efficient. If r < g, then a loan is more efficient. In this case, g is astronomically high. Yet you favor the more inefficient approach, because it hides the fact that most money spent on tertiary education is a waste, and you want this waste transferred to the old rather than kept by the young.
> engaging directly with the world via travel or talking to people outside our bubble A mandatory year mixing all social classes is, by definition, "bubble-popping".
Ahh, yes, those isolated campuses with safe spaces and psychological violence counselors -- a true bubble popping experience.
P.S.
You can also be old and foolish.
> Ahh, yes, those isolated campuses with safe spaces and psychological violence counselors -- a true bubble popping experience.
Again, this is very American-centric.
> You can also be old and foolish.
Considering his credentials, it seems unlikely.
And in a lot of jobs, you don't need much more than some core knowledge, and being independent enough that you can learn on your own - you can't teach a specific job at the university, that's what internships are for. Teaching jobs, (outside of technical schools), is the responsibility of the companies.
Note that the overwhelming majority of engineers, especially bridge ones in France don't come from the University system - but rather the élite ingénieur schools - maybe a bit like the US Ivy League ? (There's the super-élite school literally called "Bridges and Roads") Those get a disproportionate amount of funding, but aren't that relevant to the discussion, since they only teach a tiny minority of students (~5%).
I recently came upon an interview with Oliver Faron, administrator of one of these élite schools, which has a specific focus on education of people returning to superior education. They also have an especially good record with 20 times better results with technical (="low-quality") high school graduates than universities.
(I guess that extra funding and the self-selection of the most motivated students might have something to do with that ?)
And his dream is to have a mandatory year of university to replace the long-gone mandatory military service, so that the different social classes get to "live together" again ! (More than one year would probably make for diminishing results?) : https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/la-conversation-scien... (fr)