There's no feedback mechanisms which penalize the university for turning out unemployable graduates. Peter Thiel actually talks quite a bit about this. I think

There's no feedback mechanisms which penalize the university for turning out unemployable graduates. Peter Thiel actually talks quite a bit about this. I think you're right on the money. We must consider the increased cost of a university education and how its function has shifted in society. The university, for the most part, is now a training ground for corporations. We can see this in the dramatic shift away from the humanities and intense focus on STEM. STEM is essentially a corporate career path -- especially science. So we have a strange situation: universities are acting like job training institutions, but they are not directly coupled to industry. They want to maintain their ivory tower aloofness, but they lost their ivory tower status when they opened up the floodgates and became part of the cooperate pipeline. I think the university system is having an identity crisis. This wouldn't be the first time it has changed what it is. We must remember that the prototype of the modern university was a semi-religious institution used to train the clergy. Funny that you speak about the ideal of education being sacred...at one time it literally was. And perhaps the secularization of the university system is also a symbol of losing that sacredness. Certainly, the demands of the earth are more important to the university of today than the demands of those platonic realms home to pure intellectual curiosity and moral transcendence.