[DesaiAshu]

It is generally understood in the industry that around half of universities are in significant debt / financial distress (started prior to Covid // the demographic peak // recent DoE cuts). Graduate underemployment is also quite high due to a lack of alignment (or perhaps slow alignment) of degree programs to career outcomes

https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-...

https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/aug/jobs-degrees-...

Ideas for solutions here:

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED604299.pdf

[fc417fc802]

Can we take a minute to consider that degrees aren't supposed to be aligned to career outcomes to begin with? That's what vocational schools are for. Somehow academia became conflated with both a job training program and an adult daycare service and (at least in the US) the result is a confused, inconsistent, expensive mess whose exact purpose isn't clear.

[bpt3]

You want them to go back to being finishing schools for the wealthy, as they were before Hopkins (funnily enough) founded the first institute in the US that would be seen as a form of a modern university today?

For people who aren't financially independent, education is a means to an end. Pretending that's not the case or worse, shouldn't be the case, is absurd to ask of anyone running a school and highly damaging to society in general, and the mix of "vocational training" and "classic academia" provided by most US universities seems to work extremely well.

[PearlRiver]

Actually not true the first universities were supposed to produce clergy for the church.