Even Elite Colleges Have Become Trade Schools
Short-term return on investment is an impoverished view of a college education.
... it feels that, as a country, we’re “losing the point” of college, which in his mind, was supposed to be about figuring “out who you are and what you’re interested in.” His experience was that “people need to know what they want to do after college when they get to college,” which is a tall order for a teenager.
...a poignant anxiety I hear when I speak to college students: They have started worrying about employability the second they walk through the campus gates, if not before. While President Trump has pitted the idea of higher education against trade schools, as if the two types of institutions have different aims, that distinction is largely antiquated.
As the new school year begins, it’s worth pointing out how students and administrators treat colleges — even elite universities — as a catapult to a “good job” above all else.
Which is to say: Colleges are already trade schools.
The top two majors for students at four-year institutions as of 2022 are business and health professions. In June, the Department of Education issued its “earnings accountability” rule, which states that undergraduate programs have to show that their students earn more than a person with a high school diploma, and graduate programs have to show that their students earn more than a person with a college diploma, or they risk losing access to federal loans.
Nathan Heller, in a 2023 New Yorker article about the death of the liberal arts major, offered a history of the competing aims of the American university. In the 1960s, our institutions of higher ed were described by Clark Kerr, president of the University of California system, as a multiversity that “incorporates the tradition of land-grant universities, established with an eye to industrial-age skill sets. And it provides something for everyone.” The pursuit of knowledge and beauty, scientific research, and pre-professional studies were all bound together, even if it was never a harmonious union.
That fractious union was breaking apart long before the second Trump administration took a wrecking ball to the federal funding of research across disciplines. But the effort to put higher education in its place started much earlier. Over the past 30 years, there has been a concerted effort by mostly conservative politicians to diminish trust in the value of college, and to provide less federal funding for it. They paint America’s colleges and universities as foolish, progressive hotbeds of ethnic studies departments where impressionable young people get expensive Marxist indoctrination rather than marketable, useful skills.
It wasn’t always like this. There used to be bipartisan agreement that our universities were a source of civic strength, and local leaders wanted to keep educated young people from leaving their states. The political scientists Eric Schickler and Elina Maria Rodriguez analyzed a data set of over 1,000 state and national party platforms from 1980 to 2025 to show how Republicans have turned against higher education. In the ’80s and ’90s, some state-level Republicans supported public universities with high praise and high funding, Schickler and Rodriguez explain in an article published this year in the journal Studies in American Political Development.
...When we reduce college to metrics like short-term return on investment, we are ignoring so much human potential it is staggering: Young people who don’t have the resources to pay out of pocket for their college degrees are going to be pushed into jobs that they might be ill suited for, rather than getting to explore their intellectual potential in fields that are not immediately remunerative.
Who knows how many kids we have already trapped in a cutthroat competition to get a small number of finance or tech jobs, when their brains might have been put to better use creating the next great piece of literature, designing a new kind of green building, or working in a lab that could lead to the next medical breakthrough? When we impugn the more esoteric ambitions of higher education, we lose the ability to dream big about what our young people can accomplish...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/12/opinion/elite-college-trade-school.html?smid=em-share
Short-term return on investment is an impoverished view of a college education.
... it feels that, as a country, we’re “losing the point” of college, which in his mind, was supposed to be about figuring “out who you are and what you’re interested in.” His experience was that “people need to know what they want to do after college when they get to college,” which is a tall order for a teenager.
...a poignant anxiety I hear when I speak to college students: They have started worrying about employability the second they walk through the campus gates, if not before. While President Trump has pitted the idea of higher education against trade schools, as if the two types of institutions have different aims, that distinction is largely antiquated.
As the new school year begins, it’s worth pointing out how students and administrators treat colleges — even elite universities — as a catapult to a “good job” above all else.
Which is to say: Colleges are already trade schools.
The top two majors for students at four-year institutions as of 2022 are business and health professions. In June, the Department of Education issued its “earnings accountability” rule, which states that undergraduate programs have to show that their students earn more than a person with a high school diploma, and graduate programs have to show that their students earn more than a person with a college diploma, or they risk losing access to federal loans.
Nathan Heller, in a 2023 New Yorker article about the death of the liberal arts major, offered a history of the competing aims of the American university. In the 1960s, our institutions of higher ed were described by Clark Kerr, president of the University of California system, as a multiversity that “incorporates the tradition of land-grant universities, established with an eye to industrial-age skill sets. And it provides something for everyone.” The pursuit of knowledge and beauty, scientific research, and pre-professional studies were all bound together, even if it was never a harmonious union.
That fractious union was breaking apart long before the second Trump administration took a wrecking ball to the federal funding of research across disciplines. But the effort to put higher education in its place started much earlier. Over the past 30 years, there has been a concerted effort by mostly conservative politicians to diminish trust in the value of college, and to provide less federal funding for it. They paint America’s colleges and universities as foolish, progressive hotbeds of ethnic studies departments where impressionable young people get expensive Marxist indoctrination rather than marketable, useful skills.
It wasn’t always like this. There used to be bipartisan agreement that our universities were a source of civic strength, and local leaders wanted to keep educated young people from leaving their states. The political scientists Eric Schickler and Elina Maria Rodriguez analyzed a data set of over 1,000 state and national party platforms from 1980 to 2025 to show how Republicans have turned against higher education. In the ’80s and ’90s, some state-level Republicans supported public universities with high praise and high funding, Schickler and Rodriguez explain in an article published this year in the journal Studies in American Political Development.
...When we reduce college to metrics like short-term return on investment, we are ignoring so much human potential it is staggering: Young people who don’t have the resources to pay out of pocket for their college degrees are going to be pushed into jobs that they might be ill suited for, rather than getting to explore their intellectual potential in fields that are not immediately remunerative.
Who knows how many kids we have already trapped in a cutthroat competition to get a small number of finance or tech jobs, when their brains might have been put to better use creating the next great piece of literature, designing a new kind of green building, or working in a lab that could lead to the next medical breakthrough? When we impugn the more esoteric ambitions of higher education, we lose the ability to dream big about what our young people can accomplish...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/12/opinion/elite-college-trade-school.html?smid=em-share
This is exactly what I’ve told my students, to engage critically (and transparently!) with AI as an interlocutor, not a search engine… with this caution: “Just remember that personifying AI does not make it an actual person… but (contrary to popular presumption) it might actually emphasize and reinforce your own singular humanity.” As Jaron Lanier keeps reminding us, we are not “gadgets”… but AI, in its non-humanity, can also be more than a mere gadget. It can be a constructive collaborator, supplementing but not displacing or replacing our distinctive form of intelligence. We should investigate, albeit with circumspect caution and reflective judgment at every step, the creative possibilities this technology may afford.