Colleges ignore growing skepticism of higher ed at their peril
Unless we want to try to compete on labour price&#x2F;working conditions, we are going to have to globally compete on having educated workers designing cutting edge solutions. It&#x27;s in everyone&#x27;s interest for lots of people to be educated.<p>People are skeptical, I think, because many degree programs have opened up for which there is little use for their output, and little employment opportunities afterwards. Not only that, but many existing and useful programs have pivoted away from useful work and building on other knowledge, and have begun futilely re-creating the same experiments with minute differences without really trying to identify anything worthwhile. It&#x27;s hard and probably wrong to say that people that run these things should hold themselves and their students to higher standards, but clearly somewhere somehow there is a culture mismatch between what people hope to find when they enter vs what they actually get.