As Robin Hanson has said, school is not about learning [1]. Increasingly it feels that higher education is becoming a cargo cult, a coming-of-age ritual where you jump through certain hoops in order to be awarded a piece of paper which then gives you access to jobs.

[1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/08/school-isnt-about-lear...

I was fortunate (?) enough to have a Ph.D. advisor who told me flat-out: "Don't express an interest in teaching. It's career suicide. Undergraduates are stupid and you'll waste your time." It still bums me out, first of all that this is how a tenured professor thinks about undergraduates, and second that this is probably a clear-eyed and honest appraisal of the system as it stands. What exactly are we doing at big land-grant universities, if not trying to educate the young citizens of our state?