One of my student at the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine graduated with a degree in marine engineering. He also had a Maine lobster license. With the earnings that he had from lobstering and his future earnings as a third assistant engineer, he was able to walk into the bank and at age 21 get a $500,000 loan for a new lobster boat.
A Princeton graduate told me outside of her science and math classes it was mostly just fluff.
Universities and colleges have made themselves irrelevant. I remember when I was a young person that we were told that the primary reason to get a liberal arts degree was to teach people how to think critically. This is no longer the case. And this has not been the goal of colleges and universities for decades. They currently produce graduates who not only cannot think critically but who can only read at a mediocre level.
Other than the catastrophic waste funding these institutions, our country is fortunate that nearly all of the top institutions have excluded so many super bright young people through DEI discriminatory entrance procedures. This has meant that the cream of their generation has had to find other ways to obtain the skills and education that they need.
They have now become largely irrelevant because of nonsensical policies and practices... at this point few people are going to care when their staffs are axed and their DEI students are sent on their merry way.
Take away the taxpayer funding!
Poor students? Let them take basic classes at the community college, spending their evenings studying at the local library.
Little more wasteful than the college sports, dorm, entertainment, tutoring, bureaucrat, etc., etc., industry.
I have a BS degree from 1980. In 2014 I got the bright idea to take a math class at my local community college in the evenings for personal enrichment. After that more classes followed and next thing I know I’m getting an associates in biology. A few things stand out in my mind, the first is most of the just out of HS students in community college do not want to be there and should not be there. The second was that the students in the 2 liberal arts classes I had to take were far different from those in STEM classes and the same goes for the professors. I remember one incident we were waiting in the hall to begin a biology lab when a fat chick with purple hair stopped by to inform us that gender was a man-made construct and that she personally had no intention to breed with any man. This was of course appreciated by us males that were worried about having to do the deed against our will.