Comment by lo_zamoyski

There is indeed a mismatch between the traditional de jure mission of the university and the de facto mission it has today.

What is the university traditionally for? Education. What curriculum is most quintessentially constitutive of education? The liberal arts (traditionally understood, not the flakey pot-smoking/Dead Poets Society counterfeit). What is the purpose of the liberal arts? The free man.

What is the mission of the university today? Job training (putting to the side the question of how well it actually accomplishes this end). What are jobs? The servile arts.

There’s the heart of the contradiction. The university has a split personality that has rendered it bad at education and bad at job training, and to add insult to injury, it charges you Ritz prices for Motel 6 service.

The idea of universal education was never sensible. “Democratization” leads to mediocrity, because now market forces demand you satisfy the customer. You fail everyone by doing this. You get people that are uneducated (despite what they fancy themselves to be) and poorly trained for work, and on top of that, burdened by crushing debt. What a great start to adult life!

I propose that the first fundamental change needs to occur first in primary education, which is generally quite poor. Try teaching the basic liberal arts in primary schools (some adaptation of the trivium/quadrivium). Then, either after high school or by bifurcating high school into university-bound and trade-bound tracks, you choose one or the other track. In general, the majority should be in the trade track (where “trade” includes more that just plumbing or construction or whatever, but also vast swathes of what we put people through universities for for no justifiable reason).

Then we unsaddle the university of its job-training duties. Instead, you have apprenticeships and technical schools and so on to prepare people for their occupations. The university is stripped of anything that weakens its mission as educating institution. Valuable ancillary activities are spun off into, say, technical institutes.