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Comment by porknubbins | Hacker News Reader

This is a little sad but probably inevitable. I went to one of these rural small liberal arts school decades ago (good faculty but no national reputation). Even then it felt anachronistic with a bunch of privileged young people studying like English and philosophy and history but in a giant beautiful isolated summer camp. There was no real connection to industry or jobs (or the outside world) and not much STEM so if you didn’t have connections you kinda got screwed. Makes me want to reread The Secret History though, it perfectly captured the weird cozy but suffocating vibe of being trapped in an isolated bubble with the same people for years on end.

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Yet that environment is probably much closer to the original purpose of a university than most others. Philosophy students at a small liberal arts school are much closer in spirit to Renaissance-era Oxford, Sorbonne, or Bologna. At least compared to STEM majors at an urban campus in a work-study program.

The point of a university pretty much is to hole yourself away from the broader world and engross yourself in the life of the mind squirrels away from practical concerns about the real world. It's kind of weird that we shoehorned this whole idea of career preparation for mass populations into an institution that's uniquely unsuited for that specific purpose.

Then we get pissed off because when those same universities don't do a good job preparing students for the job market. But that's like complaining that a winter coat is uncomfortable to wear to the beach.

> It's kind of weird that we shoehorned this whole idea of career preparation for mass populations into an institution that's uniquely unsuited for that specific purpose.

it's because of the GI bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill , which setup a generation of people who got cheap/free college. Then they, obviously being educated, did well, and it flowed out on to the rest of society.

University was originally only for those who have the privilege of paying for it. And if you could afford it, you wouldn't need to worry about jobs or having to pay bills. But the recent college education dogma for jobs has transformed it to a utility, an "investment", and thus loans.

There is a place for loans to college education, but not as high as i see right now.

Hmm, I too agree. Essentially we are looking for something between a trade school and the ivory-tower of a university.

Bootcamps are close, but I think they are over-promising in their speed (only 12 weeks!) and have some reputational issues now.

A lot of universities have adapted and are offering separate but closely related programs for software dev and CS.

...and also closer to the "original" fact that only the very few children of the privileged class could afford to attend and study nothing but Philosophy.

How many philosophers do we need?

I would much prefer every person on Earth be a philosopher than no-one. I think a lot of bad things exist today not because someone saw a good option and a bad option and chose the bad, but because someone saw two options and, being unable to tell which was which, chose arbitrarily.

Fucking all of them!

> Makes me want to reread The Secret History though, it perfectly captured the weird cozy but suffocating vibe of being trapped in an isolated bubble with the same people for years on end.

The cozy vibe of murder?

Jokes aside, my impression of the school in that book was that it was closer to one of the fancy east coast SLACs that do have somewhat of a reputation, but it's been a while

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