Thanks for linking to your blog post, that was a worthwhile read. I recently finished a Ph.D. and bailed on academia. I'd been working in a factory as an elec

Thanks for linking to your blog post, that was a worthwhile read. I recently finished a Ph.D. and bailed on academia. I'd been working in a factory as an electrical engineer before this, and I naively thought I could do something about the overall poor preparation of my colleagues. (I worked with engineers who had grave difficulty with basic statistics, for example.) While in grad school, I came to the demoralizing conclusion that the system was working exactly the way it was supposed to. The university, as an institution, has no interest at all in whether its students actually learn anything. Engineering professors are incentivized not to teach undergraduates -- indeed, there's a whole system of reward and punishment around the assignment of teaching duties. A light load is coveted, and the most elite professors manage to teach as few as two courses per year. My advisor drove this home when he told me that expressing an interest in educating undergraduates was career suicide, and I shouldn't waste my time. The main reason college students don't learn to think is that it's not the univeristy's mission to teach them how. I've said it before in this forum, and I'll say it again. You can get a great education at the modern university, but nobody's going to stop you if you decide not to.