As learning became more prestigious, rich kids started going to universities as well. They were not there for vocational training. But they were the newcomers. The original model of university student was the one Westfall described in his excellent biography of Newton: "a plodding group, narrowly vocational in outlook, lower-class youths grimly intent on ecclesiastical preferment as the means to advancement."

If anyone wants to learn more about the origins of universities, I'd recommend Haskins's Rise of the Universities.

Also, how do I know which books are most accurate? Looking at current political or biographical books, I see how slanted almost all books are because I have many other sources to go on and the relevant context to judge a book's accuracy. But all of this context is missing for historical books so I have no way of judging how biased or inaccurate they are.

What if I were learning history from the equivalent of a Glenn Beck?

Interesting question how to tell whether you're reading a biased account. It would take an essay to answer that. After you know some history, you can tell because biases causes their owners to make mistakes. But there's probably also internal evidence too. Never seeming surprised would be a bad sign, for example.

The catch--

"History is a set of lies agreed upon" - Napoleon Bonaparte

The whole "after you know some history" demands a framework of a macrocosm to which one must depend entirely upon second-hand, at best, accounts. The glue that holds it all together is so tied to so many handles for bias both at the hands of the proxy observers as well as within the very bonding agents in the mind of the aggregator that the whole enterprise is rife with corruptive feedback potential that the anomalies that can be conclusively nailed as bona fide mistakes tend to be, for the most part, minimally useful for bias detection that tells you something you didn't already have a rather high certainty of.

wat.

Seriously, it took me something like 4 minutes to understand what you wrote there. Maybe I'm just tired.

My apologies, to all.

The key is usually to identify the larger debate going on and make sure you know the different sides. For instance if you're going to read a book by Milton Friedman it's helpful to read up on the various schools of economics to see where he fits into that debate. I believe the term that applies here is erudition. You want that.

The irony is that today's anti-university movement is largely composed of people of this personality; just replace "ecclesiastical" with "technological", and you've captured the essence of the popular arguments for dropping out.

I personally do believe in this higher goal of education.

Undergraduate education has broadened, but with all due respect to my peers, that sounds rather like an apt description of present-day grad students. (s/ecclesiastical/academic)

The "capitalist" idea of education is actually a demotic idea of education: that the non rich kid can also attend the same scholars and get their money back some day. That model is well-entrenched because most kids attending are middle class.

Rich kids can still get an education for its own sake, if they want it.

The capitalist function is at odds with this. Job training focused curricula teach practical skills to the detriment of timeless "enrichment" subjects. This damages the level of public discourse and is hostile to democracy (well-informed decisions on the part of voting public). It trains people to submit to a corporate environment, instead of enriching their inner life for decades to come.

This is why things like YC are excellent: they teach the best of capitalism, ie, leadership, risk-taking, meritocracy.

People should be free to determine how many dollars they want to attempt to accumulate relative to other goods. I completely agree that we need to get the price of Higher Ed. in the US under control. I also think that we need to be more up-front about what you can really get out of it: the "signalling function" of a degree (http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/handicap/honest_econom...) is fundamentally wrong-headed and doesn't do anyone much good: it leads middle-class kids who just want a decent credential to waste money on a college that is torn between vocational school and a transformational mission, and employers don't get much in the way of real information about a job applicant from it.

Sorry to ramble. I'm just very glad to see this conversation begin to open up; attitudes towards and uses of college degrees are incredibly broken, and it seems like a massive "re-factoring" of the whole system (concerns include: civic sophistication, quality of life enrichment, entrepreneurial, vocational-centric) into smaller, more focused parts is what is needed.

The serious acceptance of YC and other options like it is the first step along that path. Education is not one-size-fits-all, and we have been telling ourselves that about the "college" system for far too long.

Many students, in all sincerity, do not want to be transformed. They want the job ticket.

I don't think that everyone should be forced to accept a traditional liberal arts notion of university. I think instead that fewer people should go to university, and many universities really ought to be trade schools instead.

It is the signalling value of university education that has caused its dilution; much as the signalling of peacock feathers has rendered the male peacock quite useless.

"It trains people to submit to a corporate environment, instead of enriching their inner life for decades to come." Whilst I agree with you that schooling (not education) does this, please look at the percentage of people employed by small business in the US vs. 'European Democracies' I think you'll find that many more Europeans have corporate overlords than Americans.

"See, the sad thing about a guy like you is in 50 years you're gonna staht doin some thinkin on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certaintees in life. One, don't do that. And Two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin education you coulda got for a dollah fifty in late chahges at the public library "

I mean, Erasmus is one main starting point of the humanist tradition, and it would be difficult to characterize him as a wealthy kid hanging out in fashionable cities attending private seminars.

The wealthy were able to avoid having their kids attend such institutions precisely because they could hire private tutors! Either that, or they would attend only pro-forma, essentially buying a degree.

(edit: I'm absolutely hand-waving a lot here, so I am prepared to be corrected)

It wasn't limited to theology, though that was some of the original impetus; even the 13th-century universities commonly taught law, philosophy, and medicine. Through the 14th/15th/16th centuries most of the rest of the subjects were added: mathematics, astronomy, literature, etc. Galileo, for example, held a university chair in mathematics a century before the wealthy started sending their kids on the Grand Tour.

Indeed from everything I've read, university students were seen as stereotypically poor up until around the 18th century, living either at the university in vaguely monastery-type conditions with common dining and small quarters, or attempting to rent cheap rooms from townspeople, sometimes leading to tensions as locals felt the influx of poor students was ghettoizing the area (the area around the University of Paris was slightly notorious for centuries).

The tradition of the poor rich kid has endured to this day.

Thanks for correcting me on the Grand Tour.