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Comment by Juliate | Hacker News Reader

> then there aren't enough jobs in any market for the students on their courses.

That has always been the case, because the purpose of universities is not feeding the market with workers or founders, it's feeding society with educated people. Which is incidentally an excellent basis for both founder and worker roles.

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That is the aspirational purpose, not the functional purpose. Universities have long advertised job placement rates for the majors in their departments- I recall a lawsuit against a university I was going to by alumni with the allegation that the numbers were artificially padded to the point of false marketing (I don't recall the outcome, though).

Even if we were to accept the premise that universities exist to feed society with educated people, we should then question the value of the education students are getting, given the significant grade inflation over the last 20 or so years.

"Universities have long advertised job placement rates for the majors in their departments" - they shouldn't have, this was actually never their purpose but it was easy to make that promise when jobs were easier for college graduates, so they used it to sell more seats. No one can give you a formula to get a job. You're competing with everyone for a scarce resource. That formula is self defeating. Let's enroll 10000 students and promise all of them that if they are on the top 500 they will be employed at one of the 100 available jobs?

And really, if universities wanted to feed the entrepreneurship engine, they should use their endowments to create funds within their programs, so innovative students could apply for, get some seed funding that is required to actually become a real business and generate a return on the fund.

Then you not only create actual founders, you grow your endowment and you actually evaluate the university on their fund's performance.

You democratize the YC model. I wonder why they haven't tried. Maybe bc they can't actually create founders?

That’s not aspirational, that’s their very original purpose, which lands in their name.

Right but the tenor of it is different. In the 90s if you went more than a fortnight of job search after you graduated and didn’t get to being offered an interview, either you only had a third class degree or there was something very wrong with your CV.

These days every job has hundreds of applicants. In the AI era, thousands.

A University education is priced as though as it has near-term ROI. The government has subsidized it on the basis that it's opening an investment with strong near-term ROI to its citizens.

I don't think you can claim that this ROI is not its purpose.

If you only see life throuh a ROI lens…

I do think ROI is the best lens for trying to explain why something is priced at a substantial fraction of a million dollars.

For a very specific frame of time, and a very specific definition of "return".

Looking back at history, most, if not all marvels of the world have been built without a ROI lens.

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