As always, I tend to engage in decent thinking about random aspects on life when I’m procrastinating a project or a task that I know I need to do but really don’t find the motivation for. This time, it’s the Market Research Presentation for my senior design project, which is somewhat funny, given that I chatted with my roommate today for hours about the role of college in society - both today and possibly in the future. The way I see it, there are five main roles that college plays:
The trade function of colleges is to help students get a job, specifically by learning some knowledge relevant to obtaining a career. Why does seemingly everyone want to major in CS or engineering or business? Certainly, it helps that those majors tend to produce (at least at UT) average salary outcomes in the $60,000 to $80,000 range (data can be found here for McCombs, Cockrell, and CS - though I feel like the CS data must be off in a highly conservative direction). Taking 4 years of architecture classes teaches you something about how to “do architecture” for a living; taking 4 years of finance classes teaches you something about how to “do finance” for a living.
Colleges play a certification role for your knowledge. MIT OpenCourseWare and Stanford Online and plenty of other websites have knowledge that’s publicly accessible for free, but it’s much harder to use that knowledge for the purpose of getting a job, since you can’t (as far as I know) have MIT or Stanford or whoever else tell an employer that you’ve taken the classes and passed some standard for knowledge. A degree from UT is a piece of paper, but it’s one that signifies a level of competence.
To give a (residential) “college experience”. I think that this is one of the most important things I’ve taken out of college - the people I’ve met, the conversations I’ve had, the parties I’ve attended (of course, my definition of the latter is far different than your average business major’s). As this semester has illustrated better than any other, there’s an incredible different between doing classes online from home and doing classes in person. Late nights at the library or exploring the stadium are core memories of my time in college.
To promote the idea of a classical education, which involves learning for learning’s sake. I think that most people would default to liberal arts majors when they think of this - people studying languages like Greek and Latin or philosophy or 19th century French literature, but I’ve always thought of the folks that study pure mathematics just because they find it interesting. I’d argue that the vast majority of students today don’t have any intention of get a classical/broad education - see why most kids (including myself) take classes at community college or take AP/CLEP exams to avoid “boring” introductory classes in history or economics or literature or calculus.
To continue the research function. While most students aren’t interested in pursuing a PhD (and thankfully so, since there’s not enough spots for that many PhD applications), there are a few people that I’ve met that were laser focused on research in college.
My roommate holds the position that at least for CS, college doesn’t really do a good job of the first role. In my experience for electrical engineering, that certainly seems true - about half of the major ends up in software engineering related positions, yet my roommate and I never really learned solid practices for debugging, or writing documentation, or source control. At least our algorithms classes taught us how to prove obscure facts about Gale-Shapley!
The certification role is one that’s sticky over time, and one that slows down the progress of “career accelerators” like Hack Reactor, Lambda School, and Pathrise. Sure, those sources might be more focused on teaching you job-relevant skills, but ultimately the brand recognition of a university’s CS department is likely to remain stronger and more pervasive, at least for a while.