What else would it be for the vast majority of people? You're investing thousands of dollars (either directly, or through opportunity cost) and huge chunk of time. If you can't make back that investment, then it just isn't worth for most people. The number of people that could make a living from pure research is always going to be miniscule. The number of people that could justify the expense (or opportunity cost) to just learn something for pleasure, is miniscule.

> that's not the ideal that gave birth to the university in the form that we recognize it

Right. Because originally universities were for the ruling and religious class that could justify the expense of education for its own sake. In modern world, many more people could make that calculation too, but lots of people could not justify the expense ... especially if you put this in these kinds of stark terms.

>And so it's not clear to me whether universities as we recognize them will continue to exist if we continue to view them as a jobs programs.

They could not. And that's a good thing. Humanities are a mess just for the reason that they take tuition and time from students and leave them hanging out to dray, after they graduate with no direct job prospects (i.e. a way to make a living).

You describe the function of the current system, it's not an inevitability. There's massive wealth in the US, and it could absolutely subsidize a different kind of education which is intended to produce an educated and informed citizenry. It's telling that this is not a priority. (One could also imagine a hypothetical culture that does not prioritize earnings so highly, and could value other attributes of service or community more highly than earning high incomes, but let's not get too crazy here...)

In reality, and sadly, higher ed is a series of moats. At the highest tier, the expensive schools protect the oligarchy by keeping their children in different social spheres than the rest of the population. At the level of state schools, it's a zero sum game that people feel forced to enter because their ability to make a living is otherwise severely impaired.

No. It couldn't. You certainly could make a 4-year degrees ostensibly an extension of high-school - where the school is fully paid for - and some countries do do that. There's still opportunity cost of not earning an income for those 4 years. There's no getting around that.

>One could also imagine a hypothetical culture that does not prioritize earnings so highly, and could value other attributes of service or community more highly than earning high incomes, but let's not get too crazy here...

Plenty of people do that already. In fact, most people balance out income with other life goals whether it's through career choices, deciding to stay home and raise kids, or even deciding to stay in some city because your entire family is there. So I don't know what you mean by a "hypothetical culture that does not prioritize earnings so highly", everyone already makes those considerations and though income is important, for most people it is not the most important thing.

>At the highest tier, the expensive schools protect the oligarchy by keeping their children in different social spheres than the rest of the population. At the level of state schools, it's a zero sum game that people feel forced to enter because their ability to make a living is otherwise severely impaired.

I don't agree with that characterization at all. For one thing, state schools provide quality education (that is as good as any high-priced ivy league school). I'm not sure what the zero sum game you're referring to is. Many people do see university as a vocational institution and what's wrong with that? Making Nobody is forcing anybody to do anything, and most people are excited about becoming teachers, or software developers, lawyers, nurses or architects.

Long ago I worked at a startup in Los Angeles. We had software engineers from all over, but because of the location many from UCLA or Cal Tech. We used to have a joke about hiring a "CS major from Brown". I am sure Brown is a great school. But some of the Ivy League educated people that we would interview would have a ton of confidence and polish but not necessarily better technical skills. So they felt they deserved a better job, but it wasn't clear they were equipped to do a better job.

I know UC-Davis provides as good or better an education than Stanford (not at all sarcastic and meant in an earnest way), but it seems willfully blind to not see that they serve different social and economic roles in the American class system.

Sure. Just like a BMW is a status symbol in a way that a Toyota Corolla is not. The irony in this case, which also applies to state vs ivy league schools, is that a Corolla is a more reliable car (cheaper to operate and cheaper to maintain too!) - so as a car it is 'better', though just not as 'cool'. Similarly, a state school will provide you a quality education at a fraction of the cost and afford you all or most of the same kinds of opportunities as a ivy league school.

So what does that mean for the 'American class system'? To me it means that we live in a a society where you can spend lots of money to acquire 'status'... or you can save that money and do your own thing.

After a car leaves the showroom, it's ultimately up to the owner to decide what to do with the car. A Corolla is great at getting groceries, but a BMW can not only take you to supermarkets but also win races on Sundays.

Oh BTW, BMW has just won the 24 Hours of the Nürbergring this past Sunday.

Are you denying there's a networking benefit to attending an Ivy League school? I don't have the article I was thinking of handy, but this source (0) seems to say the main advantages are networking and status.

[0]: https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0811/the-value-o...

The sad part is that with the exception of those graduates with degrees that require mathematical or statistical rigor, I don't find my college educated friends to be better informed than my friends without degrees.

If there is one thing I could change about education in the US, I would add classes in statistics starting in the same grade we start teaching algebra and I'd have students take both a pure math and a pure statistics classes every semester until they finish their schooling.

Classes in philosophy, especially the philosophy of science I think should also be required. As should classes in logic.

The problem is that education has become a factory that teaches people what to think and not how to think.

In earlier times, we were sending a few people to college to be leaders, and thus all were expected and required to learn to persuade. The hoi polloi were not in college, and were to be convinced by said rhetorically trained leaders. There were many more hoi polloi, and democracy provided the check and balance between the educated and manipulative (in good and bad ways), and the unarmed masses.

Now we have many more topics to cover and many more students, thus the term Universe-ity. Few students learn rhetoric formally. Which is good in the sense that when there is an expectation of needing to argue, it descends into sophistry. Arguments about how many angels fit on the head of a pin, etc.

What all non-rhetoric students should learn is how not to be convinced, not to be persuaded. Something that has been called critical thinking. There have been a lot of writings in the past on how to train students in critical thinking. It was a hot topic in post-WWII education. When 60 million people die, arguably because of a lack of critical thinking, and those that survive go to college on the GI Bill, they start asking good questions. When hundreds of thousands of older students who lived through the horrors of modern war entered campus, they made it clear to the Academy that critical thinking was a priority. That sort of moral authority, gained at the end of a rifle barrel or in a cockpit facing life and death, is lacking now.

Expand that to persuaders in the visual arts, and it becomes media studies. Media studies as the transliterate counterpart of critical thinking and classical rhetoric in text. Logic falls under rhetoric. And, when you think about it, there is a broad overlap between statistics and media studies. I recommend the book, How To Lie With Statistics, published in 1954. Tufte wrote some good stuff too.

Not everybody needs to learn to be a persuader in college. That can be picked up later as needs arise or not. But everyone coming out of college needs to learn to be a critical thinker, an anti rhetorician. There are standard techniques, philosophies, ways of thinking, psychologies that could be bundled together in a Freshman course. I’m still a fan of General Semantics and cognitive bias research myself. Mixing humanities and STEM in a common cause. Fifty years ago as a high school senior, I developed a unit plan to do something similar for high school students.

If anything I’d say more college-educated citizens is a shield against tyranny, as it trains you to be more intellectually critical, and therefore (one would hope)c , inoculated somewhat against anti-factual biases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...

Though note that the gap closes when you compare "equivalent to a 4-year degree or higher" rather than "equivalent to a 2-year degree or higher". Seems that 2/3 year degrees are much more common in the US for some reason. Wonder if that's 3-year bachelor's degrees vs. the more common 4-year in many European institutions.

E.g. US/UK/DE/FR, pct completed for 25-34 yr olds:

2 year: 47/49/30/45 4-year: 36/42/28/28

I'd be interested in further reading/analysis as this is a pretty rough eyeball of the tabular data on my part, and I'm not claiming to have understood this fully.

Here are several examples of political bias/indoctrination/monocultures on college campuses:

- College faculty have overwhelmingly singular political preferences, based on their donations: https://www.thecollegefix.com/92-percent-of-college-faculty-...

- Professor who exposes lack of academic rigor in grievance studies is investigated by his university (Portland State) on "ethics" grounds: https://quillette.com/2019/07/29/when-ethics-review-becomes-...

- College students oppose free speech/thought/inquiry on campuses per polls: https://www.thecollegefix.com/shock-poll-most-students-oppos...

- University debate society bans Richard Dawkins from speaking to prioritize the "comfort" of their students: http://www.universitytimes.ie/2020/09/the-hist-will-not-be-m...

- University uses COVID as an excuse to ban some gatherings but not others based on ideology: https://www.scribd.com/document/477474467/Southeastern-Legal...

- University punishes student for his Instagram posts: https://reason.com/2020/07/24/fordham-university-disciplines...

- Professor threatens to fail students who write about Trump in a positive light: https://www.yaf.org/news/illinois-professor-threatens-to-fai...

- Professor bans student from class because he challenged the professor's views on gender: https://www.foxnews.com/us/college-student-kicked-out-of-cla...

- College tries to censor coursework that paints negative views of Islam: https://www.thefire.org/federal-court-rejects-unsound-lawsui...

I could keep going but this is what I was able to find quickly through search. The reality is that there is no room for views that go against the prevailing culture on most campuses today. Those who share the prevailing views are now in the camp of using the power of their supermajority to suppress/censor/punish/ban anyone who disagrees with them. Honest debate and truth seeking cannot take place in such an environment - and if that is true, then it follows that university environments tell people WHAT to think, not HOW to think, and that constitutes indoctrination.

You evidence demonstrates that is not the case -- many of those left-leaning professors are employed by institutions funded by the governments of red states.

Of course, it's completely reasonable for a sociology professor to think that social issues are important, just as much as we might expect a business or economics professor to believe that business or economics is important. And the things that people think are important influences a person's politics.

If you look at the academic disciplines that are interest groups that conservative politics align with, you'll find conservatives there: petroleum engineering, business, marketing, religious studies, etc. The thing is, there's just not that many academic focus areas that contemporary conservative politics prioritizes in their messaging.

In the end, I don't think the bias of individual professors at a university is a concern as much as institutional bias is. You can never really hire a professor who doesn't have an inherent interest in their own work. The important part is that we continue the western tradition of well-rounded study so that people are exposed to as many differing viewpoints as possible.

We probably both agree that individual bias cannot realistically be eliminated. However, I feel that despite biases, individuals shouldn't practice disingenuous academic behavior. As a quick example of this, I'll offer that sociologists regularly claim there is a significant gender pay gap without performing a multivariate study that controls for various confounding factors. If they exercised more rigor and held a sincere mentality of truth seeking, they would explore those obvious contradictions to their assumptions more readily, and also welcome the same explorations from their students and peers.

I think intolerance for different opinions is broader than just professors though. It's also campus administrators (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/opinion/liberal-college-a...) and the students themselves (https://www.thecollegefix.com/shock-poll-most-students-oppos...). If this intolerance persists or worsens, the outcome will be that anyone who disagrees must self-censor and express blind faith to avoid negative consequences. That's not academic freedom, but rather religious coercion.

Look at the voting registration or political donations among academics in the United States. They are skewed almost exclusively toward one party, despite the fact that the country itself is quite divided. Even arguing that it's common for a field to self-select and skew this way or that, there is an extreme political monoculture among the instructors at most U.S. universities.

Now, can one _prove_ that this leads to an insular intellectual culture there that presents one side of an issue? Probably not, that's a hard thing to prove because persuasion and beliefs are a very complex and multi-faceted topic. However, common sense would dictate that yes, when all of your instructions are aligned more or less with one part of the political spectrum the end result is a lopsided presentation of things that has the effect of indoctrinating students to the dominant political view of the instructors, even if that was never the explicit intent.

One example from my own experience. I had a public health professor who did a multi-part lecture on the evil of the U.S. embargo on Cuba. This took place over several classes resulting in about four hours of total lecture time, and included a fair amount of history. At no point during any lecture did she mention the Cuban missile crisis, i.e. the Cuban government allowing the Soviet Union to place nuclear weapons 90 miles off of the American coast, putting a large portion of the population at risk of nuclear destruction. Now I don't think this necessarily justifies the embargo, but to spend four days of class discussing the embargo on Cuban without a single mention the Cuban missile crisis is intellectually irresponsible at best, and a example of someone's personal bias worming its way into the instruction.

Defunding an area of study because the ruling party doesn't like it sure looks like state propaganda to me. Funding coming from the government makes that easier.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/world/europe/soros-hungar...

They already got rid of the non-government funded ones, that didn't seem to be any more difficult that going after the government funded ones...

Edit: I should add that, while most of the people who think college indoctrination is a problem would think it's propaganda to teach gender studies in the first place and defunding it is not, the very fact that an administration has to make that decision at all means that someone somewhere is going to feel the government is indoctrinating their children.

Manipulating public opinion may seem petty or roundabout for a government but having legitimized policy creates a lot of stability for decision makers so it seems worthwhile. The gambit even pays off when the majority of the public isn't persuaded by education too, since the people who agree with you are by definition the "well educated" you can give their opinion more weight without seeming like a tyrant.

That's the idea being alluded to by the parent here at least I think.

However out of all the institutions I have personally and anecdotally interacted with, universities have by the far the most openness to dissenting ideas, by a very substantial margin.

A lot of people revel at the amount of internal gossip and conflict within universities, but the fact that it exists, rather than there being people kicked out without question, is a testament to its flexibility.

3/4 of the university students in the US are currently enrolled in a state-subsidized public institution. This has been the status-quo for many decades.

To the contrary, US state universities are known for their solid educational foundations and research output -- and the reputation of various private-universities in the US is rather spotty.

The very top schools and the very worst schools tend to be private, with the latter being the (near-?)scam, for-profit schools.

I understand that it is how many americans view the world, but claiming that the society that I live in can't possible exist is... disheartening.

Not that there’s anything wrong with vocational training compared to a university. The plumber who came out for a 15 minute house call probably makes more than I do in a year.

The quality of work put out by German tradesmen is also world-class: I think the system deserves praise. Small manufacturing businesses are the backbone of German exports.

Corporations (who pay lower taxes than citizens) in charge of education is a specific form of dystopian hell.

What you're missing here is that colleges... teach stuff. You are more skilled after you get a good STEM degree than you were before you got that degree. Medical schools aren't a "zero sum game" or way to protect the oligarchy, they teach you how to practice medicine. This tangible, practical value of education is missing from the humanities.

There is still a stark difference between someone who has the expectation that: "college will get me a job" and "college will give me the education I need to be successful". And that difference is not whether or not someone is employable.

There are many activities that universities facilitate, which are of upmost importance to society, but are not vocationally important. These activities should not be undermined. If you want a vocational education, you really should be attending an institution with that goal.

The vast majority of people leverage their liberal arts education in furtherance of not only their career, but their quality of life in general. Narrowing that scope is a regression, not an improvement.

If vocational schools aren’t offering the types of educations that job seekers are looking for, that’s a a failure of our vocational schools, not a failure of our universities.

I'm agnostic about the value of this: on the one hand, we need informed citizenry who can dissect media and think critically. On the other hand, we need practical skills and we don't need a massively indebted younger generation.

The DIRE push for undergraduate education in many K-12 schools has probably undervalued solid vocational training. What does it say that I'm now into woodworking and making things, but in my entire 22 year education, no one ever showed me how to use a single power tool.

That isn't what universities are creating though. They're creating people who think one specific way about the world. The problem is that they only teach Marxist ideas about the 20th century, and you have to go elsewhere to get a balanced and realistic view of what actually happened. My humanities classes 20 years ago all glossed over the horrors of Stalin's gulags, the horrors of Mao's great leap forward, and all the death caused by Marxist ideas being put into practice at a wide scale in the 20th century. I had to learn about all these things from my history classes. My humanities classes were all talking about the evils of capitalism while glossing over the 20-100 million dead from starvation and exposure under totalitarian communist regimes. I can't imagine it's gotten any less biased and one sided in the past 20 years.

>I had to learn about all these things from my history classes.

So the education provided you with multiple, different viewpoints, then. If you evaluate specific, individual classes, yes, you'll find a bias depending on the specific, individual faculty. I had faculty ranging from those who extolled the virtues of a strong-man in the white house, to those who wanted a complete anarchy.

I'm willing to bet most university/college educations contain a little bit of everything.

Or, put more simply, wide ranging viewpoints. . . .

Can you summarize the ideology, instead of merely demonizing it? ;)

To you, what is a "Marxist idea" about the 20th century?

And if your teacher really did gloss over the crimes against humanity committed by Stalin / the USSR, Mao / the PRRC, then, well, that person was a poor teacher.

If you want to learn humanities, you can pretty much read any book anytime in your life (in fact most of the teaching in humanities is just assigning books to read). I would say that there the value added of a college over an online reading list is marginal. For STEM, completely different story, it is very hard for someone who hasn’t been trained formally to pick it up later in one’s career.

I don't know what college you went to, but at mine, reading was the homework, and the discussion on the books (even with the professor's inherent biases) in the class with my peers is what developed the profound thoughts and ideas that I still carry with me. Humanities might not contribute to jobs, (I'm STEM) but I don't for a second regret the philosophy classes I took.

I went to a large well ranked public university class in the United States, have both a STEM and non-STEM degree with over 200 credit hours over 4.5 years and I can think of exactly two humanities classes that had real discussions that weren't just being assigned books, largely uncritically accepting their contents and being lectured. Both classes with real dialogue were higher level classes with just over 10 people in them.

One class was about the intersection of art and technology and the other was a philosophy of science class.

There was way more critical thought and dialogue on average in my STEM classes.

If you can read through Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy and get everything out of it without help good on you, but I certainly couldn't.

The pragmatic part of humanities is argumentation and writing. You can't get that from just reading.

What you're saying is like "the value of a computer science degree over just reading programming books is marginal." It's ignoring that the most important part of the learning happens in application.

Or, you know ... history?

Or even Shakespeare, for that matter. For some, a course makes reading such material hugely more enlightening.

To you, apparently, one book is as good as another?

Can you elaborate further?

>“How is math manipulated to allow inequality and oppression to persist?”

That doesn't seem like injecting ethnic studies into math to me.

In fact, I think this is an excellent type of question. Schools should be teaching more critical thinking exactly like this, in every domain. For example, manipulation of scales, axes, statistical bias, and mathematical context are one of the key tools that people like climate change deniers use to spread their propaganda. Mathematics education should be about more than just handraulically banging out a bunch of long division. Interpretation and context are key underpinnings of mathematics.

Math is also manipulated to allow the perception of inequality and oppression to persist. It's not just one side using these propaganda techniques.

Don't you think it's important to teach children to consider how statistics can be cherry picked to support arbitrary agendas?

I'm okay with having classes pointing out propaganda so long as it is even handed in pointing out propaganda irrespective of agenda. If a professor only points out the propaganda of those with whom they disagree, that's a bad class.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/black-lives-matter-oxford...

Sorry I asked.

to be fair, there is a subset of leftist thought that advocates placing lived experiences above statistical arguments. you can see this play out on social media where people are scolded for not being fully convinced by an individual's personal story about {insert macro issue}. the argument here is not that math itself is racist (how could it be?), but that the study and application of it can be. in other words, if statistics is disproportionately studied by an already-dominant subset of society, its application will likely lead to conclusions that more or less support the status quo.

"You get a no-penalty 'incomplete' and can complete the course later" seems vastly more appropriate than saying you learned something that you haven't. I'm sure some people were negatively impacted; they should not suffer a poor grade as a result. Nor should they be granted a better grade than the ability they demonstrated.

I'm not necessarily saying it is, just that the issue covered in the article is only tangentially related to the "math is now racist" strawman. personally, I think no-penalty incomplete would be more fair, although I'm sure someone could find issues with that too.

my guess is "lenient grading" starts to seem more reasonable when you take into account what a lot of schools were already doing in response to covid and remote learning at this time. giving incompletes is a reasonable measure to take when you have a couple students with extenuating circumstances. but what do you do when almost all the students have been impacted by a sudden shift to remote learning? you can't just give the whole class an incomplete and delay everyone by some fraction of a semester.

Why not? If it was medical school and you didn't learn topic XYZ, you'd rightly be held back until you did (or at least I hope you would).

Are we giving grades based on effort/attempt or based on knowledge acquired?

it's not really that simple. grades are just a way to measure how well students have met the course expectations. the expectations may or may not be reasonable in the first place. if there was no curving and year after year, 90% of students fail a course, the material would get adjusted. either fewer topics would be covered, or less difficult problems would be selected from each topic. the syllabus itself is an implicit curve, in a way. when someone designs a data structures course, they design it in a way that a target portion of the students will actually pass the class. they don't just say "well, arrays, linked lists, binary trees, rb-trees, BSPs, splay trees, octtrees, hashmaps, bloom filters, skiplists, and all the different types of heaps are essential topics and everyone who can't master every single one in 16 weeks fails". there's no objective standard for exactly what set of topics needs to be covered and learned in a particular course (or major), you just try to teach as much as is reasonable.

This is because using power tools is most of the time following safety protocols and reading the instruction manual. if you learned how to read well, you shouldn't need someone to teach you this (unless you're using highly specialized tools for niche situations, but that's more of vocational training)

Why would I use a spade vs a single point vs a Forstner drill bit? When would I use a backer board? When would I use conventional cutting vs climb cutting? If I want to achieve tolerance X on face F, what should be my sequence of operations? How can I fixture this work to give me the best results? When is a circular saw vs a table saw vs a jig saw vs a mitre saw appropriate?

In the 1970s one could earn ~$2.75/hr as an entry level employee at a union job in a factory (~$20/hr today). UVA instate tuition and fees were only $484/yr, meaning that over a summer a student could earn ~2 years worth of tuition and fees.

At the time, spending the opportunity cost also opened doors just from having done it - substantially lowering the risk.

I'm in my mid-30s and managed to pay for the first two years of (community) college out of pocket while waiting tables. Quarterly tuition was ~$1500; I just cut a check at the registrar after scheduling my classes. By the time I went back for my BS a decade later, costs were closer to $10k per semester.

I disagree with that. Most people who enter college in "soft sciences" or "humanities" these days understand very well that it's a risky investment that will probably not get them rich, or not even get a job. Still they enroll into it, because the knowledge and understanding they seek, the relationship they want to build with the world, is not tied to the brand of their car or the size of their house.

> They could not. And that's a good thing. Humanities are a mess just for the reason that they take tuition and time from students and leave them hanging out to dray, after they graduate with no direct job prospects (i.e. a way to make a living).

Why is that a good thing? Just because the humanities don't funnel into jobs the way STEM does doesn't mean that they should cease to exist. Every book you've read, movie you've watched, song you've listened to, play you've seen, etc. has been a direct result of our journey through the humanities, and I'm positive nobody thinks those forms of entertainment should just "cease to exist". It's the same thing for countless other fields of study universities offer. The problem is not that these fields don't have the ROI of STEM, it's that the cost of education is way too fucking high.

Ah yes, but how many of these would require obtaining a 4-year degree with 6-figure debt?

In the words of Matt Damon from Good Will Hunting “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”

Perhaps we should allow the Peace Corps to grant 4-year degrees? I feel like that would give you the best of both worlds.

What exactly do you think "the humanities" are?

Sure there are exceptions to the rule, just like how there are people who have contributed greatly to the humanities without stepping foot in a degree granting institution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare#Early_life

People who want to end democracy rarely say so, it is always just "a little less than it is now".

Same for education, where would you draw the line?

When you make this argument for college, it seems reasonable to also ask “is grade 12 the ideal point at which this fitness function is optimized for most?” Maybe it should be after grade 14. Maybe it should be after grade 10.

Its supposed to be to attain an education, but judging from the communication capabilities of many college graduates education was clearly not the top priority.

> Humanities are a mess just for the reason that they take tuition and time from students and leave them hanging out to dray, after they graduate with no direct job prospects (i.e. a way to make a living).

If you wanted job prospects you would instead focus upon a professional license, which is not education. In addition to better job prospects it's also cheaper and substantially less time consuming to attain.

At least in the US, too many fields rely on the degree as the professional license, so there's no alternative.

That doesn't sound right to me. That may have been partly true, but education was also just necessary training because the jobs demanded literacy and other specialized training.

In the 70's, and earlier parts of the 80's, a university degree was your passport to a job. You had a university degree. You KNEW something. In the UK students were given a grant.

As the saying goes, what a wise man does in the beginning, a fool does in the end. Time passed, this mindset persisted, but things changed. The whole thing became increasingly commoditised, universities now seem less like seats of learning and more like commercial enterprises, with people talking all manner of crap about "return on investment". Graduation fees were tagged on and students nickeled-and-dimed at every opportunity.

The US seems to be particularly egregious in that respect.

The whole thing has become a fiasco. Universities and governments want to keep the game going as long as possible, with young people being suckered into enormous debt on the premise that they'll get a good job out of it. That premise is looking increasingly sketchy.

What "should" happen, IMO, is a return to the 70's. School pupils should get a good educational grounding through O levels. You can then get a job, or pursue further education either with an academic bent (A levels) or a vocational bent. For the really bright, the possibility of university exists. For the less bright, but those who want to pursue skilled professions requiring a lot of knowledge, there is (or at least was) Polytechnics.

We don't have that, though. What we have is a monstrosity of a system that still seems to be able to sustain itself despite common sense dictating that it is no longer fit for purpose.

How long can this continue? I don't know. I do hope it collapses, though. We need a better system than the one we've got at the moment.

It seems like this is a rumor that refuses to die. Humanities majors do just fine.

According to a 2018 ACS survey,[0] humanities majors are looking at 2.13% unemployment, which is comparable to other fields. The same survey shows that people who majored in the humanities earn comparable salaries to their peers in other disciplines.[1]

A 2014 study in Forbes found that humanities majors go on to earn even more than their peers in other disciplines as they all advance on their chosen career paths.[2]

I'm curious why the image of the deadbeat humanist persists, especially in an era where we need people who have been trained to look at potentially misleading information, identify why it is misleading, and point us towards better sources. Rampant misinformation in this social media age has shown us that "the facts" are much more slippery than anyone would like, and we need people who have been trained in the subjective arts of parsing contradictory information and -- even more importantly -- justifying their interpretation to others.

[0]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ld4Ki99C_0WFUcyBXyix...

[1]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ld4Ki99C_0WFUcyBXyix...

[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2014/11/20/surpr...

The vast majority of people need to work for a living and need practical skills that others are willing to pay them for. The idea that the university should exist for "learning for the sake of learning", and the idea that "everyone should go to college" is incompatible. You can have one, you can have the other, you can't realistically have both.

If you want to learn for the sake of learning (I know I do), there's never been a better time to do it. The average person with a $200 laptop and an internet connection has access to more and better information than a Harvard graduate student did 50 years ago. We need to rid ourselves of the notion that college == education and that education == college. At this point a college degree is mainly just proof that you are diligent and were able to follow directions for four years while meeting deadlines.

On average a college graduate will have one million dollars more of lifetime earnings than a high school graduate. This one million dollars will be taxed at at least twelve percent federally. Twelve percent is a very conservative estimation on the federal tax rate of that money. This means the federal tax revenue of a college grad is at least one hundred and twenty thousand dollars more than a high school graduate. The average net price of a public college education with room, board, fees, and tuition is fifteen thousand four hundred dollars a year, or just under sixty two thousand dollars for four years.

In four years the federal government spends $62,000 to send someone to college.

Over their lifetime the federal government receives $120,000 back.

Today we create jobs for staff, professors, admins, etc at university. Tomorrow we have a more educated and skilled workforce.

Of course, what I really want is for my fellow citizens to be more well read, better critical thinkers, and better informed citizens. Sometimes the best way to sell someone on something isn’t to focus on what you want out of the deal.

This does not scale. Adding more college degrees does not make that many more productive jobs exist. It just moves the education bar higher for the jobs that do.

College degrees quadrupled since the 1960s. Productive jobs haven't. We already have an oversupply of degree holders working at Starbucks.

The stark reality is that the human race doesn't and can't have enough aggregate demand to productively employ everybody. The necessities of life - food, housing, medical - really only take about 10% of the population to produce and supply. Maybe another 20% in productivity-adjacent areas like finance and government services and other administration. Everything else is leisure and service economy, and there isn't infinite demand for that.

Does that statistic account for greater starting wealth of college entrants?

Maybe 25% of the students in the program were there to learn how to make video games. They weren’t there to get a job in making video games. They weren’t there because there is money in making video games. They were there because they wanted to know enough about computer programming to make video games, and everyone had ideas about what type of game they wanted to make.

Spending $100,000 to boost your income by $20,000 per year for life is a very simple argument.

On the other hand, to argue a manual labourer with a $100,000 philosophy degree that didn't boost their income at all had nonetheless made a good investment requires much more complex arguments about the nature of human happiness and the inherent value of knowledge to the individual and society. Which in turn leads to a wealth of follow-on questions which can't be answered with any finality.

Luckily (unluckily) the decision is easier because to buy a house at 30, you likely need the degree too, so the question is flipped.

As such they do better financially than other humanities majors:

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/09/philosophy-majors-...

So in a sense, they were always jobs programs. If today they seem secular, it's because society was able to reshape the institution over time. For example, the Morril Act, which established the land grant universities, made it's utilitarian purpose explicit:

> without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.

But it's not clear to me that universities _should_ exist as we commonly imagine them. Why are the worlds top researchers presumed to be the worlds top educators, when we have all the evidence in the world they are not and generally believe being recognized as a good educator is a career curse? And even if they were at least good at the job of educating, why are there 100+ courses independently designed without meaningful comparison?

There was an ugly truth even to the ideal that it allowed scions of rich families to network - so even when it was a jobs program in neither practise nor theory it upped one's chances of success later in life dramatically.

Once that game was known, the attendant success became desired and colleges were flooded with applicants. Colleges optimised for large numbers of undergraduates motivated by socioeconomic mobility, their marketing efforts and staffing levels are optimised for that reality.

I'm not sure when you encountered universities, but I was never aware of them being marketed as anything but jobs programs, and I'm closer to an X'er than a Zoomer.

The vast, vast majority of high school graduates aren't going to be professional athletes. But everyone (I hope) understands that we don't have PE in schools just so that schools can supply professional sports leagues with athletes. We have it because it helps people live better lives, even if it doesn't prepare them for a job.

True but originally it was just a small subset of people that went to university.

I get it when people say this, but at the same time, I don't. Why are you basing the effectiveness of the institution in modern times on what it was designed for half a millennia ago? The world has changed since universities were introduced. Do you do the same thing with other institutions that were around at the same time? Do you talk about how marriage customs were different in the middle ages and what we call marriage now is not originally in the spirit of marriage the way it was practiced in the middle ages? Do you talk about how the catholic church was run in the middle ages and how organized religion is different now, and how we should consider what religion was used for centuries ago? Why are universities some special exception that get to be downright reactionary and not move forward with the times?

The salespeople: College is a way to get a high paying job.

The professors: College is about exploring academic subjects.

The students: College is a rite of passage to be part of the upper-middle-class.

IMO, the only way to fix the system is to be stricter about who gets into college, and more lenient about who's hired for professional jobs. Also, we need more trade schools.

Sure, this country with that thinking might be able to attract the best talent from other countries to innovate and do research, but politically it might not be wise to always count on it.

When a populous has the mindset of dismissing universities and education to just get a job, then don’t be surprised when they fail to keep up with the latest advances in AI and science.

The shift to the right coincides with a decades long attack on academia and intellectualism. Change incentives, allow the structures to corrode and the weight to shift and the bridge will come down on its own.

If one is only outcome based and based on simple linear line of sight, we will never make the discoveries. But if that statement is outcome based, we should be settings these minds free to discover everything they can, not just STEM advancements.

This is a comforting narrative for leftists, but it's objectively false.

The attacks on academia and "intellectualism" (isn't it interesting how progressives presume a monopoly on this, just as they do on progress?) are a reaction to the exploitation of the academy as a tool for political indoctrination.

Individuals with openly right-wing beliefs are personas non grata on faculty, in administrations, etc. There's a reason for that. The left is desperate to maintain its stranglehold on one of the major sense-making organs of the culture - and its stranglehold on the ability to socially engineer the next generation of educated professionals.

If the financial investment in university doesn't provide social mobility, if it's a nebulous "preparation for citizenship," then you're essentially asserting, by default, that people who are blind to the financial ROI of university are better citizens.

We've lost those as ideals. Instead, we interpret all the liberal arts through racialist-socialist lens, and find they required us to adopt norms outside ourselves.

The ideal we do hold together is hating authority and norms outside ourselves -- whether that's racial, religious, political, sexual, biological, musical, literary, fashion, filmmaking, etc. Just Do It. Have It Your Way. Think different.

So, the jobs part is the part we hold in common. The ideals dispute is leading to violent protests in the streets.