Some thoughts: 1. In 2010, if you want to be truly educated, you have to do the work on your own. This was probably always true. Going to a great college helps

Some thoughts: 1. In 2010, if you want to be truly educated, you have to do the work on your own. This was probably always true. Going to a great college helps, but it's a 20 or 50 percent improvement on the use of your time, and only if you use the time to learn: the opportunities are amazing, but no one requires that you take them, and many students don't. You can learn a lot more with the Internet and a library card than by completing what minimal work is required to pass through higher education. 2. Related to (1), the biggest benefit "college" offers to a person's education is that it allows "traditional" (read: well enough off to do college "correctly"-- residentially and in a four-year block without employment on the real economy) students to spend a substantial portion of their life with a very high degree of freedom without any non-educational work to do. Some students would be better served with $200,000 to spend as they wish, and an excuse to take four years off and do as they want... but that's not socially acceptable. 3. Our society has a disastrously mixed attitude on whether to invest in culture and refinement. Generally, we don't, and the result is an America that is hypercommercialized and ugly, with very few cultural achievements and a "high art" scene full of nouveau-riche charlatans. Tenured professorships aren't too numerous and overpaid, but the reverse is true. Although universities have a huge problem with bloat, professor salary is not the source of the problem. My major reason for hating what academia has become is that the universities are raising tuitions while slashing academic jobs: one or the other could be acceptable (leaner, cheaper universities; or rising costs for better quality) but the combination of both is intolerable. We invest heavily in the trappings of culture, but essentially ignore it otherwise. This is why the people who contribute most to culture (artists, writers, teachers) find their contributions undervalued, and most professors are encouraged to treat their teaching as commodity grunt work. 4. Universal higher education got its steam from its relatively broad-based support across the political spectrum. The Left (which has been irrelevant since the '70s in the US) believes that bringing the proletariat into college will turn them into rebels, primed to fight back against capitalism (which hasn't happened). The centrists and conservatives (US Democratic Party) believes that making college more accessible will increase social and economic equality (which hasn't happened). The right wing likes universal higher education because their corporations get a sorting mechanism whose costs are paid by someone else (the public, and the people being sorted). Of those three "parties", the right wing is the only one to actually have gotten what they wanted out of it. Only in the midst of a massive recession are we beginning to realize that this movement was mistaken.