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Short term I agree, it won’t work, but keep in mind that ATM, Theres a monopoly on university level job training. The old university system was all there was, and so they never faced much competition for post graduation job placement. If the new academic system can produce higher quality education and therefore better graduates, eventually it will be noticed that graduates of these institutions do better in the workforce than traditional college graduates. Depending on the school and major the new academy doesn’t need to be that good to outpace the current university system. Most people coming out of the university today are probably less educated than high school graduates of the 1960s. They are not well-read, they don’t understand the scientific method (unless they happen to graduate in STEM) and don’t know how to do serious academic research or write logically coherent papers. Heck, even the professors seem to be less able to do serious academic work.
Does anyone actually want to hire a humanities degree holder? I can’t imagine anyone looking at the current crop and wanting them in any part of the business. They’ve mostly majored in being liberal, campus protesting, and becoming a litigation nightmare. If there were alternatives, they’d be completely unemployable simply because even minimal job-related competence (doing dispassionate research, doing the work assigned, staying on topic, and knowing better than to be a walking, talking bag of grievances all of which are based on something the company could be sued for) those people would be snapped up. Why hire a blue hair when Hillsdale grads can do better work and act like professional workers?
Therein lies the problem. Universities are not about education, they are about selection. Until you can reliably demonstrate you are getting better admittees than Stanford, Stanford will be better than you. And no one will agree to go to your school instead of Stanford until you show you can place them...
So the burn it down plan is the only plan that has a chance of working. Once people are dubious about going to the current universities because they cant take out loans to go there and no one else can either, so why bother? Then something else can spring up.
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