I’m all for the demise of universities, at least the modern American incarnation of them. They’ve become ideological monocultures and echo chambers that are agg

I’m all for the demise of universities, at least the modern American incarnation of them. They’ve become ideological monocultures and echo chambers that are aggressively hostile to any sort of diversity of thought. They seek diversity in skin deep ways, and will accept you as long as you give up your deeper diversity and adopt their way. They are a threat to intellectual culture not a bastion of it, and the article’s implication that their reduced role in “intellectual inquiry” is a problem doesn’t make sense to me. Leaving that aside, on more practical matters, they simply don’t provide value. I find their alleged role in developing critical thinkers to be minimal and for my earlier reasons above, they may even be working against that interest. So if they aren’t doing that then surely they provide value in a more obvious manner - but most students study degrees that have no value, which is clear because no one is willing to pay for their skill set in those fields when they enter the workforce. And with everyone being encouraged to go to college, it is increasingly a poor differentiating signal for talent. Tack on massive expenses for their bloated administrations and I see no purpose except for college except to be a fun social environment that costs tens of thousands of dollars a year. Surely we can achieve that through other means. As the article mentions , most of college material can be learned virtually or even in self directed ways at significantly lower cost. All we need in terms of centralization is certification (testing of knowledge). I would like to instead see us do more with community colleges and trade schools, and do more by way of choice in education broadly - whether K-12 or higher education. The current model needs to die a swifter death.