I’m curious if this problem can be solved. I suppose on the one hand, if some universities can prove that a harder curriculum leads to better outcomes, then yes, but our entire culture is moving away from say inherent respect for the institution to a customer-orientation.

And given what I think was something of a debacle in the entire concept of code schools, can you blame people?

But do I want to pay, I dunno, $60k a year for a degree that might fail me out and even if I succeed is only tangentially related to a job?

In my older and wiser years I might pay a few thousand dollars to take a literature course, but a funny thing about credentials is…. I would take a literature course because of the hope that it might provide some inherent value that would make me a better leader/thinker/etc. not to get me a job. And the credential in some weird way is almost an anti-pattern. Really (very ideally) the measure of a university program shouldn’t be the ability to get a job, but the ability to thrive once there, particularly for the liberal arts.

It makes me wonder, I love watching movies about conservative educational institutions. But I love watching them because they're a fantasy. I wonder if they were always a fantasy. Were universities better? Or was there just less competition. Will a harder english curriculum produce higher quality graduates? Or just filter out the lower quality graduates.