The connection between the two seems pretty obvious to me.
Also, the idea that a four year degree has a monopoly on making people educated is just incorrect.
If you think it's the best thing for a society to have a well educated citizenry, then I hope you're working to get the government to pay for free college for everyone. The idea that people should have to make enormous personal financial sacrifice for the greater good of society is just bad.
2. People evaluate degrees based on financial outcome simply because there is no other way to justify spending a quarter million dollars on a degree. That is an order of magnitude more than it costs to deliver a high quality education[2].
If college were truly just about learning, you could start cranking out college-educated citizens for $20k a pop. At price it's an easy decision to make. Instead, colleges have become luxury resorts with a classroom as one of the amenities. They compete on things like best food, recreation and nightlife. It's not (necessarily) a problem to bundle education with fun, but you have to justify the expense to your customers. Colleges have chosen to highlight the differences in earnings between those with degrees and those without.
[1] Even worse: While I agree with premise that we should strive for a better educated electorate, someone arguing the opposite could easily point out that the increasing political discord is correlated with the increasing fraction of degree holders.
[2] The cost of the primary input has decreased: Faculty salaries have been stagnant for 40 years--for a given "level". But faculty salaries have actually decreased when you account for "title deflation". Colleges increasingly rely on "adjunct" faculty and delay the promotion from assistant to full professor. It is now common for PhDs to do two or even three post-docs (which can include teaching duties) before getting a first appointment. Thus, a 40 year-old academic today has a lower title and costs less to employ than a 30 year-old academic from the middle of the 20th century.
I read somewhere, but unfortunately can't remember where. That disaffected highly educated people stir up a lot of political trouble - so these things might be related in a causal way (though I'm a little skeptical).
I also wonder how much university just has people exchange one cultural belief system for another based on who is around them rather than learning how to think critically and independently.
My personal experience leads me to think that most people will just start to believe what everyone around them believes, I worry how much I'm affected by this too.
You could argue the world in 1950s was totally different, and today that education is necessary.
Alternatively you could take a view that the world was comparable enough to draw conclusions. But then, 1878 was 'equidistant' to 1950's, as 1950's is to today. That's the year US had witch trials. Lynching was still happening, and continued untill 1960's. Now I am willing to bet that folks here do not want to descend into barbarism, and that education has a huge role to play here.
Hitler had extreme disdain for academics. It's definitively a driving for polarization since it's so easy to draw the line. People who drop out/never enroll have a lot in common with each other and people who graduate have a lot in common with each other but once you compare college educated and high school educated people the overlap starts shrinking.
This is exactly how high-end luxury good markets work.
Selectivity is a status symbol, so you want as many as possible to apply so you can reject as many as possible.
Maybe it would be money well-spent for the public-sector to poach top academics from private intuitions.
It would lead to salary inflation, but might be the most cost effective way to sap prestige and inject into good public universities.
But that’s not even terribly relevant to the average student. An undergraduate won’t benefit from going down the same hallways as the world’s foremost expert on Nigerian guinea pig digestive tracts. But for some reason having studied at the top university (in terms of research, not teaching) matters a lot.
In the end it doesn't make a difference. Employers want to hire good candidates. Hiring is hard and the outcomes asymmetric: very good candidates can give at most 10x performance and for a company with 100+ employees that barely registers, while very bad candidates can create absolutely stunning destruction. So hiring good candidates is a high stakes game. There's lots of noise, any way to get signal out of this noise is valuable. Employers pay big fees to recruiting agencies to get good hires. A reputable university, like Harvard or MIT is like an ideal recruiting agency (and no fees): not only it finds the best candidates for you, it also trains them for 4 years. The 4 years of training function as a further filter as well. In the end, someone graduating for such a college will be quite a sure bet for employers, and so they'll have much, much better prospects in the job market. So they are willing to pay for this. Are they born smart and Harvard does not teach them anything new? Who cares? They'll get much better job offers than if they graduate from Tulane, and that translates in more money in their pockets.
They tend to attract the best teachers. And by "teachers" I do mean the best researchers in the given field. Which in turn attracts the brightest students.
I might suspect bad linear algebra teaching is caused by a lack of interest in linear algebra by the teacher.
Good researchers are not necessarily good teachers. Good teachers are not necessarily good researchers. But the best teachers in my experience are fiercely interested in their subjects, which they share with the best teachers.
Everybody likes sharing their interests, right?
The point isn't about whether colleges are there for education or not, the point is that if you have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of your life you should get a return on that investment.
The idea that people should go enormously into debt to become educated for the sake of it is crazy. If you want to educate people for the sake of society, then get society to pay for their education. Until then, people need to make rational choices about what for many of them is the biggest financial commitment they'll make.
If it was currently possible to take a group of 18 year olds, and transform them into highly motivated, highly intelligent people, I assume it would exist for sale.
Unfortunately, the construction of a person seems to be highly complex, and is subject to genetics, home life and parental wealth, childhood experiences, peer and other influences, etc.
Until then, humans will continue to use shortcuts for assessing the probability of one's future ability to "succeed" (however one wants to define it), one of which is attaining admittance at certain institutions.
I always found this idea amazing, we just accept that univerities are not really there for education but instead a giant sorting machine to separate plebs from (rich/talented/dilligent/take your pick).
They don't work like a normal market, there best company grows their production, and supplies millions with the best goods. Oxford/Harvard take their miniscule intake of a fraction of a percent every year, and opening door to unwashed masses would destroy their brand.
Do the best universities have best teaching technique, or are they best because they pick brightest students and they contribute nothing special?
A healthy market of affordable education cannot be build on this foundation of 16th century elitism, exclusion and zero-sum principle.