Maggie's Farm

Starting about 40 years ago, the universities, even the elite ones, discovered they couldn't sell that crap anymore. Sure you could feel all superior, but you couldn't make good money on it. Well, not on what you went to school for and increasingly not because you'd graduated either.

My brother graduated from the flagship state school in 1976, with a degree in history or something. He had a shot at a junior exec job at the phone company, but rathered a lineman job, for which he was deemed unsuitable for as a college graduate. He became a carpenter, well-read carpenter, but still a carpenter due to his childhood connections with men who built houses.

Four years later when I was entering college, I knew better than to waste my shot on a useless degree, as a poor person, I needed to improve my job prospects. So it was engineering for me, but arrogance arose and I went for a "liberal arts in science", i.e., Physics. Learned a lot, and having the calculus and basic physics turned out handy for a job later on. But Physics does not impress in the general job search, where hiring is done by business majors or engineers. And by the mid-1980s, they were hiring for what you could add to the company, not some anachronistic junior exec training program.

The world changed, the elite liberal arts found that they were uncompetitive in the wider middle-class student market, where the student needed to improve their employment prospects as much or more their esoteric, preening knowledge prospects.

This goes double when you are taking on debt for the "education". What idiot takes out a loan to learn what they can learn from reading and that won't help their job skills? And these days, most of what is extorted from the student as part of the "degree" is a complete intellectual waste of time and effort, which is how students apply themselves to those tasks. Downside, that apathy for the "required" bleeds over into the courses that add value to the student and are worth the effort.