Colleges being mainly a place for elites to fraternize, if it ever really existed, was a short lived phenomenon and certainly not how they were founded or the role they serve now. No one is giving out hundred thousand dollar plus loans so that you can learn for the sake of learning.
> Colleges started out as vocational schools for priests
There were three advanced schools (~graduate departments) at the typical medieval university: medicine, law, and theology.
> For much of American history colleges were places for farmers or engineers to learn their crafts.
I'm guessing you are basing this claim on the Morrill Act, which was to "provide colleges for the benefit of agriculture and the Mechanic arts."[0] It certainly doesn't describe the earlier American colleges like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, King's College (later Columbia), etc.
But even the state colleges that were founded with the help of the Morrill Act typically had loftier ambitions than acting as craft schools. e.g. from the inaugural speech of the founding of the University of California:
"The University is the most comprehensive term which can be employed to indicate a foundation for the promotion at diffusion of knowledge--a group of agencies organized to advance the arts and sciences of every sort, and to train young men as scholars for all the intellectual callings of life." [1]
But surely schools like Texas Agricultural and Mechanical were founded from the beginning with a focus on those practical skills? Nope: "Despite its name, the college taught no classes in agriculture, instead concentrating on classical studies, languages, literature, and applied mathematics." [2]
[0]: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/morrill-act
[1]: https://oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb267nb0qk&brand=oac4&doc.v...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Texas_A%26M_Univers...
You mentioned there were 3 advanced schools at the typical medieval university. While this is true, what I said was what the first ones were founded as which was the divinity school.
Then your claims about what a founder said in his speech about what he hoped the school would one day become is pretty irrelevant to what I said and no way makes me wrong. Overall a pretty bizarre response.
Not really. Higher education started with Ancient Egypt's "School of Life" (surveying, mathematics, architecture, medicine etc - physical sciences) and "School of Death" (religion, philosophy etc - social sciences). Both were intended to produce graduates who would do actual jobs rather than being places of elite making connections or priests reciting religious texts.
“Colleges” aren’t a particular well-defined class. “Universities” in the usual sense are specifically defined as distinguished from ecclesiastical schools, though the first were founded by religious communities, they had secular as well as religious degree programs.
For a primary source on how they conceptualized the role of the university, see the charter for the University of Georgia (1785) [0]. It essentially says that universities are really important and it would be unacceptable to have to send youths to foreign countries, so we're starting one here. They weren't reconceptualizing the university, they were funding the rapid development of institutions that would otherwise take centuries to develop if at all.
[0] https://sclfind.libs.uga.edu/sclfind/view?docId=ead%2FUA22-0...
The former is held in much higher regard as far as social standing goes even if we probably need many more of the latter, it requires lots of training as well, and you can even earn pretty good money.
This has not been true in my experience, I can't say I did it on purpose but I'm very thankful my primary profession is as a knowledge worker and I took on a trade as a side-hustle after the fact. A professional carpenter around here makes about $18-25/hr for what is a fairly time and labor intensive job with tight margins since customers are usually really price sensitive.
Also my first thought was more towards craftsmen like electricians, plumbers or basically anyone working within the field of renewable energies/heating (espeically heat pumps)/insulating older houses. And at least those are in such high demand where i am at that they can demand high prices.
It's a good point insofar as it shows the institution has never been static.
The oldest known university in europe wasn't about technology. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universit%C3%A0_di_Bologna
Academic outcomes are nonlinear. Outside of the job-training-ified fields like engineering, there is seldom a direct "I studied X and then made a ton of money doing exactly that". The success stories, like Tolkien, are more like, "I studied X, then I lost a finger in the great war, then I typed up a manuscript of a children's fairy tale, fast forward 100 years and it's worth untold millions." It is a winding road. All that is gold does not glitter, not all who wander are lost.
And you can't just equate societal value with "how many people consume it". An academic paper is often as valuable as a tool for crystalizing thoughts in the mind of the author as it is a tool for communicating to the reader.
I kind of feel like you are missing the point of academia.
Regardless, what makes money and what's good for society are orthogonal, and sometimes outright at odds with each other. Certainly, it's easier to make money via evil than make money via good. And, certainly, economy is flexible - it can be anything. We can have a strong economy making trains, if we want. "Free market" capitalism is not the sole economic system nor is it the most efficient. It seems China has a much more efficient economic system.
I argue higher education is good for society, even if it doesn't make money. Critical thinking is vital in decision making, and the humanities have a bigger emphasis on critical thinking (yes, really). Software engineering is "hard", but not really. Literary analysis is a different beast which requires a different kind of intelligence, one that is lacking in STEM.
You generally want a few scholars on low burn keeping the knowledge alive and contemporary. The idea that something can be studied in totality and then put away safely across generations is farce.
This is how you turn your society’s intellectual storehouses into propaganda. Lost to the West, about how Byzantine scholars preserved Roman knowledge through to the Enlightenment, is worth picking up.
What I believe you are saying is that the "popular" researchers will get ad-spend to fund their "research" that won't be peer reviewed. Why even bother publishing research, if no one reads anymore? It would just devolve into a popularity contest and following trends. Those trends will just be co-opted by monied interests.
The esoterism is due to the fact that there is a body of research that you need to know to understand the new research. Just because you can't understand the topic in a short sound bite does not mean it is not worth researching. Not all of the research is intended to be consumed by a lay public either.
Many podcasts and Patreon exclusives are behind paywalls and there is no expectation of peer-review.
In regards to calling this a "college model", not all research is done at college there is also thinktanks (institutions) and industry research which are funded by governments as well.
I think governments should be accountable for making sure the research is rigorous, has a social benefit, and is publicly available.
Forgive me, but I do not think that is a considered position. I think it comes from bigotry
Proust, Elvis, Snoop Dog, and Satoshi Nakamoto are all important to our culture as it is.
It is important to understand culture and society to be able to have meaningful social policy. Social policy that makes good use of our tax dollars
They could instead produce lectures for society - "podcasts" - and continue their mind-numbing paper writing, if that's truly what they want to do all day (hint: no they don't).
The real problem is that college was never designed to be job preparation and (with limited exceptions) it does rather poorly at that. The idea was never that you'd go to college to research a subject at the bachelor level and then go into a career that directly uses what you learned—it wasn't always a white collar trade school.
Back when college was the privilege of the elite, it was about learning for learning's sake and about making connections and meeting people. It didn't especially matter what subject you chose to learn about—you're a member of the elite after all, and you either have money already or have the family connections to get it whatever you studied.
It seems to have only been once college started to democratize that we started expecting every subject to be job prep for something specific. On one level this makes sense—you can't actually democratize the experience of learning for learning's sake alone until you democratize being guaranteed sufficient money to live on. But only a few departments in most universities are even capable of reshaping themselves into job training programs, leaving the rest to now frantically justify their existence.
This is a huge problem because the knowledge produced by those departments—even while they were only the privilege of the elite—has been invaluable. But they don't meet the modern economics of the university.