I realize that it may not square with most peoples' motivations, but in my ideal world it would be. I also think that, on the whole, college students will lead better lives and have better career outcomes if they first focus on learning. The interviewee goes on to say:

> This has to be liberal arts and sciences. Rebuild high-end cognitive skills, so that these folks don’t just go down the street to the machinist shop that’s still open if they lost their factory job.

The "high-end cognitive skills" is the important part. What you learn at college isn't necessarily the material, but how to think. That skill will serve you well in any job you have.

Education that is entirely academia-centric has a tendency to turn universities into useless, navel-gazing ivory towers.

They must be forced to meet upon a common ground.

Having graduated from college, I cannot envision myself returning for any reason other than to get a new stamp on my academic passport, authorizing me to work in either higher-salary jobs of my current field, or to change careers. All my curiosity itches have been satisfactorily scratched by link-walks on the Internet, libraries, museums, educational television, and garage projects.

I never cared for the softer side of learning, in classes that do not have objectively correct answers to problems that may be defined precisely. I certainly never cared for the excessive administrative overhead, or the disproportionately large expenditures relating to athletics. But universities cater to a diverse body of students. If I deny someone else their inverted underwater basket-weaving course, I might not get to take a course on RISC-V assembly. If I deny someone their football or basketball teams, there too goes my marching or pep bands.

I think most businesses should be focusing on vocational academies specific to a particular industry as their employee training programs. Universities should be focusing on producing universally competent individuals as their graduates. If you just want a job, you go to the academy for a length of time dependent on the complexity of the field, and come out ready to work it. You go to university if you want to be able to be able to triangulate a distress signal, navigate to the transmitter, pick a lock to gain access, extinguish a fire, perform first aid, transport the victim to a hospital, and then write a dramatized short story about it. While fending off ninjas, zombies, robots, and/or pirates. Universities should be producing people who can think critically and adapt to rapidly changing situations, not just cranking out an improved tier of worker drone. And every last university graduate should have the capacity to (eventually) answer any question that has never yet been asked, from "What is the mass of dark-matter particle-X?" to "How many dollars is 1 kg of particle-X worth?" to "What sort of name should we give to particle-X once we prove that it exists?"

My current opinion is that the blame for dilution in the value of higher education lies with the business leaders and their paid-for politicians, who have demolished employer-run job training programs, beaten down the unions that provide apprenticeship educations, and launched for-profit colleges that chip away at the funding of universities without meaningfully contributing to education, then made the bachelor's degree an entry ticket to gainful employment. The business-folk are not going to bend as long as they hold all the leverage. They will continue to corrupt academia with other people's money as a means to cutting their own costs for next quarter, and the future 20 years from now be damned.

At this scale, the only feasible solution is for academia to appeal to the heavy hand of government, which could then force business to stop undermining the foundations of higher education (until the regulators have been captured again).

that's more or less how it still works at the good private schools, with exceptions at the margin for extremely bright talent from less wealthy family/means.

public schools are supposed to break this pattern, but the best ones basically have turned into the same thing (california, michigan, virginia, north carolina, etc.) with their own hierarchy of elite campuses/locations and in-crowd associations (greek, etc.)

the entire system breaks down if you treat it as something fundamentally different, or have some invented set of expectations for what you get out of it.

I put "liberal" in quotes, because real liberalism is much more broad-minded than what's on much of our universities. Real liberalism isn't about making your opponent shut up; instead, it's about recognizing their right to exist and to have their say.