You're conflating a few things here. This is certainly how higher education started, but in many places it has not remained that way. Some European democracies have made higher education radically affordable, such that citizens can learn to think critically and engage with the issues of living in a modern, information-dense culture.

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.

I personally prefer the transformational model, but for many students that is neither desired nor likely to succeed.

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.

Education has always been radically affordable, what European democracies have done is allowed students to have their children and grandchildren pay for their schooling by offloading the cost of that schooling onto the state debt.

"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 "

That doesn't sound like any history of the modern university I've read. I don't doubt that some universities grew out of private tutoring from the wealthy, but the bulk of the western university tradition grew out of theology schools, whose students included quite a lot of the middle class.

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.

The theology schools were there first, but understandably they didn't teach much outside of ... theology. Kids with rich parents could do the Grand Tour of the continent and often visited famous thinkers where they lived. Around these sites universities often followed; eventually the idea of the university as an institution rather than happenstance evolved later.

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

I'm familiar with the Grand Tour, but your chronology seems backwards; the Grand Tour was a 17th-century creation, while the humanist university coalesced by the 15th/16th.

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).

My understanding is that while students were poor in a sense -- little to no income - they tended to come from wealthy families. Otherwise they simply had to get work or starve to death, which precluded almost everyone from study.

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

Thanks for correcting me on the Grand Tour.

Bullshit. I've been right through from my bachelors to ph.d. without paying a single dime. Academia is full of smart kids on full rides.

It's also full of smart and not-so-smart kids on full fees. Either way, rich kids are always better positioned to study whatever they want.