Comment by 141205
1 day ago
"The bulk of US college students attend colleges who do not have the resources to build high-quality, industry relevant curriculum, train teachers to teach with modern pedagogy, and efficiently manage dorms, student affairs, and other administrative infrastructure"
I would like to see a source on this: your claim appears ungrounded when considering American colleges.
It is generally understood in the industry that around half of universities are in significant debt / financial distress (started prior to Covid // the demographic peak // recent DoE cuts). Graduate underemployment is also quite high due to a lack of alignment (or perhaps slow alignment) of degree programs to career outcomes
https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-...
https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/aug/jobs-degrees-...
Ideas for solutions here:
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED604299.pdf
Can we take a minute to consider that degrees aren't supposed to be aligned to career outcomes to begin with? That's what vocational schools are for. Somehow academia became conflated with both a job training program and an adult daycare service and (at least in the US) the result is a confused, inconsistent, expensive mess whose exact purpose isn't clear.
You want them to go back to being finishing schools for the wealthy, as they were before Hopkins (funnily enough) founded the first institute in the US that would be seen as a form of a modern university today?
For people who aren't financially independent, education is a means to an end. Pretending that's not the case or worse, shouldn't be the case, is absurd to ask of anyone running a school and highly damaging to society in general, and the mix of "vocational training" and "classic academia" provided by most US universities seems to work extremely well.
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