A reader comments on the general trend exemplified at UW-Stevens Point:
It seems like many or most major universities and colleges have turned into profit-seeking vocational schools these days. I, like you, hated the humanities I was required to take in college, being in the Engineering school. But like you, it was simply my ignorance.
I think it’s a highly visible mark of how applying the goals of the private sector to the educational sector perverts the goals of the educational sector. The end result? The general, if slow, degradation of the citizenry; and, in a sense, a rip-off of the student (or “consumer”), who is paying for a full and general education to prepare them for the rigors of life – and getting substandard, or even no, education in subjects which my reader and I may not have understood in our youth, but is vital for an engaged citizenry in a republic such as ours.
That perversion in the name of more students prepared to immediately jump into jobs may end up ruining our country. A worker trained to a job is simply a worker who will eventually occupy a spot in the unemployed line. But if they are properly educated, they should be able to move on to other jobs as that first one evaporates, whether it’s due to evaporation or the continual advance of science and technology.
