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Universities should be more than toll gates

(www.waliddib.com)
140 points wdib | 1 comments | 21 Sep 25 07:19 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Eddy_Viscosity2 ◴[21 Sep 25 12:07 UTC] No.45322003[source]▶
Makes me think of the "The purpose of a system is what it does" axiom. Universities were always about credentials whether professional or just to indicate social class. They can at the same time be places of learning, and many still are in some disciplines.

The problem is that value of the credential is now worth more (to most people) than the value of the learning/knowledge. So universities adapted to the that model. Its more profitable and university presidents can now earn millions of dollars, further intrenching the problem as it now attracts exactly the kind of people into those positions who only care about money (and themselves).

The true blame for this situation, (IMHO), are the employers across the economy who require applicants have 'university degrees' for jobs that in no way need those skillsets. Bullshit requirements then led to the demand for bullshit degrees which the universities changed to supply.

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Lu2025 ◴[21 Sep 25 12:56 UTC] No.45322304[source]▶
> employers across the economy who require applicants have 'university degrees'

Somebody from HR admitted to me that they often do it to simply trim the applicant pool to a more manageable size.

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1. skeeter2020 ◴[21 Sep 25 15:10 UTC] No.45323440[source]▶
This is definitely part of it, but after working - and hiring - in the software industry for several decades I can say that a university grad has probably at least heard of relational algebra or taken a course that covered costing algorithms. Do they use this every day or ever? Definitely not, but when I interview non-uni grads the odds they can write (let alone explain) a modest SQL query are lower. There's very little causation between uni grad and good developer, but IME the best uni grads are better than the best non-uni grads. There's some signal in there.