I was the only one of five siblings to go to college. How much good did it do me? Well, compared to my siblings, that's an interesting question. My oldest sister graduated from high school in 1966, got a job at the local Northwestern Bell as a switchboard operator; she retired from AT&T as a regional VP of human resources, double-dipped as Senior Vice President of a local telecom company in eastern Iowa. My brother graduated from high school in 1967, muddled about with a few different things for a while before becoming a master cabinetmaker and then going on to design, build, and sell custom speakers, with several patents to his name. My second sister graduated from high school in 1970 and had a long career in corporate accounting - not glamorous, but steady work.  My youngest sister graduated from high school in 1972 and went on to have a career in human resources, at first with the Illinois Central Railroad, then with several smaller local companies. 

So, my siblings, sans college, all did pretty well. They all retired. I'm still working, which is obvious, since you're reading my work right now, although I admit it's been some years since I worked in the sciences. But I remember when I was deciding to seek a degree, my Dad told me how he had, in his life, worked with his back, and with his head. "If you have a choice," he told me, "...work with your head." And, yeah, that's the goal, isn't it? The primary purpose of any educational institution is to produce young adults with marketable skills. 

That's why I found this interesting; over at the New English Review, a site I find myself visiting often, author Glenn Harlan Reynolds asks, What is college good for? 

The Wall Street Journal reminds us that it was college grads who propelled communist/Islamist candidate Zohran Mamdani to victory in the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City.

Which raises a question: If this is what college graduates do, why exactly are we in a hurry to send so many people to college?

That, in itself, is a good question. I've long disliked this modern notion that "every kid should go to college," because, to be perfectly candid, there are many kids who shouldn't go to college. But the nub of Mr. Reynold's argument lies in what he describes as four justifications for a college education:

Creating wealth. College graduates earn more, so creating more college graduates will create more high-earners. A related argument suggests that rich societies have more higher education, so more higher education will make a society richer.

Promoting public values. Higher education is supposed to be a place where our society’s highest values are nurtured and taught, ensuring that they are propagated to future generations.

Encouraging critical thinking: Teaching people to think for themselves, not to accept what they’re told or to go along with the crowd.

Maintain intellectual capital — like knowledge of history, ancient languages, philosophy, etc. — that is valuable for society as a whole, but not readily supported outside of an academic environment.

Let's consider those, one by one.

First, creating wealth. This assumption is based on the institutions meeting the primary purpose I describe above: Producing young adults with marketable skills. A degree in Ethnic Underwater Dog-Polishing Gender Studies does nothing to that end, but too many of our nation's colleges and universities take students down these idiotic paths, and why not? The school gets the same tuition for a horse squeeze degree as for something serious, and the School of Dog-Polishing Studies is much cheaper to run than the School of Engineering. No equipment, no labs, no practical exercises, just an obese pink-haired "professor" or two.

Second, promoting public values. It's hard to look at, say, Harvard, Columbia, or many other publicly-funded universities without bursting out laughing where this goal is concerned; if you are looking at "public values," you have to then turn 180 degrees to see the Ivy League these days. They are, literally, hotbeds of anti-semitism and every other manner of corral litter.

There are signs that all this is starting to change:

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Third, encouraging critical thinking. Yes, that would be of benefit to all young skulls full of mush who might be serious about making their way in the world. The problem is that universities aren't doing this; they define "critical thinking" as "shut up, we'll tell you what to think." Some young skulls full of mush who go into the sciences might be lucky enough to have some serious professors teaching the actual scientific method, including a dispassionate analysis of data. In my college career - biology, with a strong emphasis on field zoology and behavior - I had several such teachers, and to this day, I think I was lucky to have learned from them.

Fourth and finally, maintaining intellectual capital. This may be the modern American education system's greatest failure. Have any of these children read Aristotle? Do they know the three laws of logic? Are they made familiar with Plato's Theory of Forms, and why it still matters? Do they know who Cato the Younger was, and how bitterly he resisted the forces dragging the Roman Republic into tyranny? How many of them even know who Thomas Paine was - or Thomas Jefferson? Have any of them read the Federalist Papers?

I think we know the answers to all those rhetorical questions. And that leads us to only one conclusion: Our current system of higher education is, by and large, a failure.

Mr. Reynolds concludes:

While the current brouhaha over racial discrimination, research fraud, and so on at higher education institutions is going on, we need to be preparing for a deeper national decision, on whether to spend that money elsewhere — or simply stop taking it from taxpayers and let them spend it as they wish.

The elevated place of higher education in America has been taken for granted for basically my entire lifetime. That will not continue to be the case, and it’s worth thinking about what the new order should look like.

I vote for B: Stop taking money from the taxpayers and let them spend it as they wish. Not just for university education. For all of it. Let a thousand flowers bloom, and if some of them are stinkers who attract the gullible to learn the useless, on their heads be it. And, no matter what else happens, the system has to change. The current system is just not tenable.

Not every kid should go to college. Maybe what's needed is a multi-path system: Robust training in the trades, and for those who attend university, decouple government financing from education, end the government subsidy of education, and end the government guarantee of student loans. Let every college, every trade school, every K-12 program run as a business, and which one of them is meeting that primary goal - to produce young adults with marketable skills - will become very apparent, very quickly.