It's a crappy essay, but it does point at a couple of systemic problems with the modern university. Grades used to be better correlated with actual performance,

It's a crappy essay, but it does point at a couple of systemic problems with the modern university. Grades used to be better correlated with actual performance, and they aren't anymore, yet they're still used as metrics. It might be better to have 2 metrics: pass/fail that counts on your transcript, and a letter grade that's private, but maybe available for internal statistical purposes (I believe a handful of teachers do this now, but the "private" grades are really private). Too much teaching is done by underpaid labor. There's not enough focus on teaching, period. There are a lot of things students might expect to get out of college, but ideally one of them is the experience of having mastered something genuinely hard (doesn't really matter what—might be physics, might be Latin) and with that, the ability to bootstrap and improve their learning later in life. If all you come out with are "skills", you'll be toast when those skills become obsolete. I think the modern university makes it a bit too easy to get out without having done this, or at least trying to. Paradoxically, I think this is one of the real values of humanities education: it's mostly not obviously and immediately applicable to the working world, but it's engaging, and if you've really engaged with it, you'll have the tools you need to understand what you need to learn in a future situation. "Learning how to learn" is a bit of a cliche, but it's the key to real success. It doesn't always happen in a classroom, mind you, but it can happen in a good one.