University Education Isn't Trade School

We told an entire generation a very specific lie, and the lie was this: that a university degree is a job requisition you fill out over four years. Pick the right major—the marketable one, the STEM one, the one with the salary chart on the recruiting slide—and you’ve de-risked your future. So we piled them into computer science by the hundreds of thousands, treating a liberal institution like a vending machine that dispenses engineers, and we did it with the smug confidence of people who had mistaken a hiring bubble for a law of nature. The trouble with funneling everyone toward the same door is that the door is downstream of a boom that already happened. By the time the cohort we frightened into CS graduated, they arrived not at the tech boom but in its long, crowded wake—a saturated market flush with juniors, all holding the same credential, all told the same story, all discovering that the “guaranteed” path had been guaranteed to roughly the number of people who could fit through it a decade earlier. And then, with a timing so cruel it’s almost artistic, AI arrived and began cannibalizing precisely the entry-level work we’d promised them. We spent twenty years optimizing kids for the one outcome, and the outcome evaporated on contact. Who, exactly, was doing the workforce planning here—and were they compensated for it?

I want to be careful, because this is not an argument against studying computer science. I’m a software architect; I’ve spent my career in it; I stand on the shoulders of the people who built the field and I’m grateful daily. It’s an argument against treating a university as the delivery mechanism for it—against the category error that put a vocational outcome at the center of an institution that was never built to produce one. Because the moment you decide a university’s job is job placement, you have to start ranking fields of study by their yield, and that’s when the whole enterprise starts saying genuinely stupid things. Like the notion that marketing is a major. Marketing is a skill—a real one, a useful one—but a major? A four-year course of study in how to make people want the thing? That’s not a discipline, it’s a department that a business school grew because the tuition cleared. Meanwhile the fields everyone loves to sneer at get it exactly backwards. Gender studies, to take the reliable punching bag, is not a punchline; it’s an extension of anthropology and sociology, which are old, rigorous, evidence-laden disciplines concerned with how humans actually organize themselves—which is to say it’s doing precisely the thing a university is for, while “marketing” is doing the thing a two-day corporate onboarding is for. We’ve got the prestige gradient inverted, and the tell is that we sorted it by starting salary instead of by whether it teaches you to think.

So let me say the thing that gets you disinvited from the parents’ weekend cocktail hour: a university education is supposed to be about expanding the mind, not training for a job. That’s not romanticism. That’s the actual, historical, load-bearing purpose of the institution, and we’ve spent a generation quietly euthanizing it in favor of a placement office with a chapel attached. I know what a real education does because I got one and it ruined me for bullshit permanently—Maths and Philosophy in a tutorial system that makes you defend every premise aloud while a don who’s read more than you’ll read in three lifetimes looks at you like an insect that wandered onto his notes. That system was not preparing me for a job. It was rewiring how I process a claim. I read the philosophers who told the truth about power—Hume puncturing causality so gently nobody noticed the Enlightenment detonate, Arendt watching a bureaucrat make evil banal—and none of it appeared on a single job description I’ve ever held, and all of it is the reason I’m any good at the one I have. The point of the thing was never the paycheck. The paycheck is a side effect of having a mind that works.

And here’s the part the yield-maximizers keep forgetting: we already have the institutions for the job part. We have votech. We have trade schools that will make you a genuinely employable electrician, a welder, a machinist—dignified, skilled, well-paid work that this country insults by treating as a consolation prize. We have credential programs and bootcamps and continuing-education tracks that teach a specific stack for a specific market in a specific year. We have law school and med school, which are, correctly, professional schools bolted on top of an undergraduate education rather than instead of one. The entire vocational ecosystem exists, it works, and it is often faster, cheaper, and more honest about what it delivers than the four-year degree we keep pretending is a trade certificate. So when we jam job-training expectations into the university and then act shocked that graduates feel defrauded, we’ve broken two institutions at once: we’ve hollowed out the university by asking it to be a trade school, and we’ve stigmatized the trade schools by pretending they’re beneath the kids who should’ve been thrilled to attend them. Who benefits from that arrangement, exactly? Certainly not the eighteen-year-old holding the loan.

I’m not naïve about why it happened. When tuition becomes a debt instrument and a degree becomes the only remaining permission slip for a middle-class life, of course families start demanding a return on investment measured in starting salary—that’s not stupidity, it’s arithmetic under duress. But the fix isn’t to complete the university’s transformation into a very expensive job-training center that’s worse at training than the actual job-training centers. The fix is to remember what each institution is for, fund the vocational ones like the pillars of a functioning economy they are, stop pricing the university like a luxury good, and let it go back to the strange, unprofitable, civilization-sustaining business of expanding minds. Because the market you optimized your kid for will be gone in a decade—mine already is being eaten by the very tools I help build—but the mind that can actually think, that can read a source, defend a premise, and smell a lie from across a boardroom, ages considerably better than any credential. So the only question left is the one we keep declining to answer honestly: are we educating people, or are we just processing them? Take your time. The tuition clock is running either way.