Attempts to reform higher education usually result in the object of those efforts digging in its heels. “The aversion to applied learning has grown stronger since A Nation at Risk came out [in 1983],” Georgetown’s Anthony Carnevale said at the National Press Club on September 29, 2010. “A good 40 percent of Americans don’t do well in traditional pedagogy,” he avers and “four to five percent of BAs are in the liberal arts.” Carnevale heads the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown. Nevertheless, according to Carnevale, the professoriate argues that “American education exists for some other purpose than...