Most of these people are better off with a McJob. No, really.
It will be this way as long as we pervert the purpose of universities.
There are three especially pernicious lies:
That university education is for everybody;
That university education is a means to an end, namely to put a feather in your cap so you can get a job;
That you need a university education to get a good job.
Sadly, the pervasive belief in the first and second have made the third true in some places, which only makes things worse. Eventually they'll all be true, and by then, we won't have universities anymore--just an expensive and unnecessary extension to public schools. If we understood the point of universities, there wouldn't be degree-mills. I get spam from those on a daily basis.
The function of higher education is to enrich a civilization by cultivating science, philosophy, the arts, and literature, and to educate people whose function in society is to preserve its accumulated intellect and to further it. Universities are not a means to an end! They are not job training! They have no commercial purpose, and they turn to shit when you give them one! Nobody should be at a university who is not there for the sake of learning--and learning for the sake of learning. What you do with that learning is your business and yours alone, but you should not be there unless you want to learn. I do not want to hear another student say that he is only here because he will make a lot of money with a degree in material science--and woe is he that he should have to learn calculus and organic chemistry, because he doesn't like learning; he just wants the qualifications because he likes MONEY--but I know I will hear it, or something analogous to it, from hundreds more (many of whom will fail out when they realize that they have to learn; worried as I am by their presence, I will really start to worry when these sort of people STOP failing).
If you want job training, that's what trade schools are for--or, hey, get this, apprenticeships! But nobody does that anymore for some reason or other. Alternatively, you could just go out and GET A JOB. There is work out there, mostly shunned by new entrants to the workforce who think that their working lives should start with a nice office with a fat salary that they did nothing to earn. Will your first job be awesome and profitable? No, because you have no work experience! Curiously, this is usually still true even if you have a degree--except that now you have wasted four years and a heap of cash, while you would already be employed and have years of work experience--which would let you get a better job, because now people know you an hold a damn job and get work done, unlike the average college student--if you simply hadn't bothered with college.
The only jobs that genuinely need college education are jobs that actually involve some kind of hard science, heavy mathematics, or engineering skills--but that stuff is actually hard, and stuff which you will be no good at learning unless you actually enjoy learning it, so most folks who go to a university would rather avoid that when they've been told all their lives that a degree in technical communication, business administration, or something equally worthless will land them a fat paycheck in some job where they get paid to do nothing important. I do not mean to discredit the liberal arts--however, those are definitely not something you study for money. But you shouldn't study anything just to make money! Like ANY academic subject, you should study them because you enjoy learning them.
Three centuries from now, nobody will care how many people went to Cambridge because it would make their résumés look better; plenty of people, however, will remember such names as Isaac Newton, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and Stephen Hawking, and ideas like Newtonian mechanics and the physics of black holes. Nobody will care how many white-collar tools went to the California Institute of Technology so that they could pursue unremarkable lives in cubicles doing shit nobody cares about; they will, however, remember Richard Feynman and quantum electrodynamics. That's what univesities are for. Consider Grigori Perelman, the mathematician who proved the Poincaré cojecture. He cracked one of the hardest nuts in the history of mathematics--one of the millenium prizes--and turned down not only the million-dollar prize, but the FIELDS MEDAL! He didn't care about money or prestige. He cared about mathematics. That's the kind of guy who ought to be at a university.
If any of these cubicle rats do go on to do something that makes them famous, does anyone care which university they attended, or even, indeed, whether they attended one at all? We remember Bill Gates and Steve Jobs because they made a huge mark on the world and ran very successful businesses; yet, neither even finished college. (Scott McNealy did, and I hear his company's doing just swell!)
As long as we value universities as no more than a means to an end, rather than value learning and the cultivation of culture and intellect in their own right, we will have this mess. I have to agree with this guy--in its present state, higher education is a burden on society because it has lost sight of its purpose, and now taxpayer money pays for thousands of people to have expensive, largely unnecessary résumé-padding. It's been watered down to that, and it's terrible. I do not object to how much money goes into universities, but to what little it accomplishes as things stand, and what this idea that universities are just a means to an end has done to universities.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
