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Comment by advael | Hacker News Reader

I think it's really sad that we so reflexively consider universities vocational training that criticism of universities so often includes "offering degrees that won't get you a job"

Actually academia predates the push to gate jobs behind undergraduate degrees, and trying to repurpose these institutions that mainly exist to train and employ researchers to be fully general vocational schools has been a disaster in every respect for everyone but the parasitic class of administrators it's spawned

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If you would like to study something economically useless I have no problem with that. If you ask me to pay for it, I do. It isn't the business of society at large to fund anyone who wants to study whatever they want.

Academia does predate its role as employment gatekeeper, but it was privately funded then.

At that time they were also incredibly exclusive and mostly the rich.

Yea, and jobs that selected by university degree wanted to implicitly select for class

Making the path to go to a university more accessible is admirable. Entrenching this hiring practice with policy designed to enforce its implications on universities was always ill-conceived and the consequences have mostly been negative, creating a class of permanent debtors, turning universities into dysfunctional and corrupt quasi-businesses, and not really causing a significant de-stratification of job opportunities on balance at all

And some jobs do. As I've noted elsewhere if you want to go into Big Law, you go to a relative handful of law schools, which are heavily fed by undergrad Ivies, and clerk at a high federal level.

Yes, like I said before, this hasn't de-stratified the job market. Jobs that want to select applicants by class can find plenty of ways to do so easily

E.G.: More expensive vocational programs that haven't been subsidized, selecting among universities for especially "prestigious" (read "class-signaling") ones, baking cultural assumptions of the upper classes into the expectations surrounding "professionalism" in the interview process, etc

I think that's effectively what a lot of people here are arguing they should be. You're not going to have cheap and quality research institutions (except via financial aid/loans). You can imagine different systems--and they exist to some degree in Europe. It's presumably not a terrible system but it probably does tend to be more exclusive.

You mean if you are wealthy you can afford the best education available and that is a broad liberal arts curriculum.

Well people aren't paying them $30,000 for the love of the game

And then on other side universities started as vocational schools for clergy. Who then also had time on the side to do at least some research or muse about things.

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