The Great University Farce

The university as it currently exists has long outlived its usefulness. We should get rid of universities, and replace them with something else.

People are finally beginning to blow the whistle of the Great University Farce. The dirty little secret is this: most people employed by universities are mediocre and don’t do anything useful. According to the New York Times:

“Most graduate programs universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student
loans)”

Also, due to excessive specialisation, most academics have a "limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems".

The whole thing is a pyramid scheme: "young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments".