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universities for working class folks need to be a place to learn employable meta-skills. College enviroment being a space for personal growth, leisure, socialization is more of elitist legacy of a begone era where companies would train you from zero and most of students didnt really need to sell their labour to make a living (why unpaid interships exist).

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If employable skills and meta-skills need to be learned (as they do), it seems like apprenticeships and the like are a far more efficient and effective way to pass those along.

Yes and no - the final skills can be acquired well in apprenticeships but for the basic knowledge it is more effective (or at least more efficient) to teach as universities do; if we look at the major professions where universities have taught employable skills since the first universities were founded, namely, medicine and law, and where the various approaches of learning these employable skills have been tried&tested for centuries, they both definitely make a solid use of apprenticeship but that apprenticeship is started only after years of studying the fundamental knowledge that is needed for the practical skills.

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