College as Crack-house

Granting disciplinary degrees is a shady business made necessary by academia's failure to sell its legitimate purpose. Instead of convincing society to finance great thinking, many institutions make money by addicting employers to the use of academic degrees as tools for screening job applicants, and then charging students to pass the screens.

Many academics admit that this business model exists, but do not take responsibility for it. Institutions that provide substantial financial aid may even try to shift blame to other institutions, as though giving away addictive drugs for free would not create a market for them. However, even the well-endowed institutions can no longer stop structuring their degrees as job-screening tools. If you doubt that you've sold the soul of higher-education, I dare you do way with career-oriented degree specializations (especially "business", "medicine" and "law") and to set caps on how many students you can admit who are preparing for new careers.

Career-training (including in business, medicine and law) is more efficiently delivered on-the-job:

1. On-the-job training is up-to-date. Especially in careers that use changing technology, much of what one learns in a four-year degree quickly becomes obsolete.
2. On-the-job training permits career change. Declaring a major for a four-year degree implies intention to work in that area for more than four years, right? But the Bureau of Labor reports that Americans change career area every 18 months, and a variety of sources suggest they should.  
3. On-the-job training need not require remembering. A great deal of the effort made in four-year degree programs rests on the assumption that students will remember what they learned, but research suggests most is forgotten in just two years. (see Bacon, D. R. "How Fast Do Students Forget What They Learn in Consumer Behavior? A Longitudinal Study" Journal of Marketing Education December 2006 vol. 28 no. 3 181-192)
4. On-the-job-training is relevant to the job. Businesses say that the most relevant parts of a four-year degree are critical thinking and problem-solving skills, but college students are directed to learn many other things as well, and 36% learn nothing relevant. 

Especially considering the need to retool the labor force to meet job crises, on-the-job training is important, and the market for that kind of education can only be hurt by the implication that academic degrees provide career preparation.

Research institutions have additionally contributed to the problem by delaying in their duty to create what John Smart calls the conversational interface. Essentially this involves teaching computers, so they can teach humans (thus allowing the integration of learning and work 24/7). It involves every discipline. Academics may have other interests they would like to pursue, but leaving this project to IBM's Jeopardy-winning Watson team is like leaving food patents to Monsanto: where monopolies are intolerable, academics must take sufficient ownership for progress to render patent law unnecessary.

I'm not sure the American people get it. Academia should play a very important role in society, and financial incentives should align it with that role, rather than distract it into providing ineffective career-training. We pity countries whose wealth relies on the export of addictive narcotics, yet America considers the export of higher-education a key part of its own economic strategy. When higher-education is reduced to a product, it really isn't so different from an addictive narcotic. This business is costing us our security, the nobility of academia, and the efficiency of our economy.