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Notes -
Two questions about American colleges:
What are some societal roles universities are uniquely well-suited to fill but just… aren’t, for whatever reason? As someone in the arts, the committed development of new/avant-garde professional work comes to mind.
Based on your moral values, where do you draw the line of how the various strata on a university campus (student, faculty, postgrad, admin, etc) can/should get romantically involved with each other? University dating policies have become vastly more restrictive/protective (based on your value system) in the last decade, especially those between the paying customers and the staff serving them. Is it simply a question of the power dynamic? Age of consent? Moral integrity?
I'm not American but eh
Uhhh the most obvious one, give students the skills to work in the profession they are getting a degree for? It's like we all just bought the gaslighting of "oh no colleges are actually just for learning how to learn, you will actually learn on the job".. well then change the way colleges work until you learn in college! 4 years and a lot of money should not leave you with "learning how to learn".
Maybe I have a tech bias here, but it is astounding just how useless the average CS graduate is at any software engineering work. Some (most) of them can't even... code ! Similarly for most other professions. I understand no institution can probably impart those skills to most people, and IQ probably isn't the only limiting factor, but they should be honest about this.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
Based on my moral values, the only two things that matter for morality is consent and age of majority, doesn't matter if the man is a 50 year old business mogul billionaire and the girl is a 19 year old heroin junkie living in the streets.
However, that which is moral doesn't tell you that which is optimal or conductive to producing happiness for individuals and society.
You are describing the minimum morality required by the law. Most universities have somewhat higher standards than that. A professor who only hires graduate students who consent to having sex with him or her would certainly not be selecting for professional quality as much as someone who hires on professional merit. Given that the funding which is paying for these students is commonly not his private property, I can see a university (as the principal) having a legitimate interest in enforcing certain standards (on what their agent does).
But I am sure that somewhere some unis go overboard with regulations.
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