While there are differences, fundamentally the proposition of mentors, internship-based learning, and living on site is not that different from apprenticeships. There's a wider exposure to ideas, perhaps (because maybe you jump between internships instead of staying with one), but at its most basic level the proposed idea is training people to do jobs instead of trying to expand their thinking minds. Yes, there's lip service given to seminars, but it's evident in the quote (“Traditional universities… list the Nobel laureates… ours… would list the… entrepreneurs, inventors, and executives”) that academics are held in a certain amount of contempt.
Let me be clear: I don't think there's anything wrong with this vision. This approach would probably be a success. It may be needed. The problem is this: somehow we mutated universities into a place where everyone goes in order to get a job. I think we benefit from having more people being educated at a university level, but that benefit is not purely practical. I don't think the point of getting higher education is getting a job. I think it's an extension of the same reason we go to school: because an educated population drives knowledge further. Because when a large part of the population gets a Bachelors of some sort, they can reason better. And because when there are more people at that knowledge level, a larger part than before gets a Ph.D. And that helps society and humanity move forward faster.
There's a tension right now between the university as a place to expand your mind and learn for the sake of learning and the university as a place where you prepare for a job. I think it's a good idea to play with that tension and that balance, and see what balance leads to better results in what way. But I think there is absolutely a place for universities as they are today, and I think their existence is part of what has driven us forward at the frenetic pace that we have seen the last several decades.
I'm founder and CEO of Shopify and I was trained via apprenticeship. Germany has the brilliant dual education system where apprenticeships have never ceased to exist and It's the true driver behind Germany's incredible performance recently. After 10th grade I left high shool and joined a company ( Siemens ) "full time" as a trainee. This means that 4 days of the week you work and 1 day you go to vocational school where you learn about CS fundamentals like compilers and algorithms. The program takes 3 years ( just like the rest of high school ).
It's true, you make almost no money, the work is hard, and you are at the bottom of the food chain but if you get a good placement you will never learn faster in your live. Trying to finish programming projects while also keeping everyone coordinated and cleaning the kitchens also does a great job of stuffing out the entitlement that so many people join the workforce with.
If you have any doubt about the merit of this style of education simply look at Germany. It's vastly superior and I'm raking my brain on how to reproduce this system in North America successfully.
Culturally speaking, America does not necessarily incentivize merit as much as Germany (and Europe) for that matter. We are a nation of marketers and salespeople, which means: (1) personal networks are key and (2) ability to sell is key. Our cultural is built on the ability to control hyperbole and attention fulfillment (bureaucracy) as opposed to hard work (meritocracy). The skills you learn in personal networks (mostly social) in American universities are much more valuable than the ones attained from apprenticeships. In the HN/SV bubble view of the world, this is may not seem true, but largely outside of that bubble it is.
Therefore, what you are looking to do is make a massive cultural shift, not just fix a system. The best way you can fix our system is to continue to make yours (Germany) better. Competition breeds motivation to do better.
note - I respect that some of my comments are very much generalized. And while I'm from the US, I do live in the UK and have lived in Germany.
There is the question of the competency of a narrowly-educated public deciding critical matters in a democracy... The American liberal arts education tradition has this focus at its core, and the poster above alludes to it: the purpose of the education was not only to get a job, but rather to make full, well-rounded civic-minded citizens.
On the one hand, the fact that German democracy seems to function so effectively, perhaps challenges this view. On the other hand, perhaps America needs to invest more in the civic area because the challenges that come from our diversity require extra strength in order for that diversity to in net make us stronger.
Let me be clear: I don't think there's anything wrong with this vision. This approach would probably be a success. It may be needed. The problem is this: somehow we mutated universities into a place where everyone goes in order to get a job. I think we benefit from having more people being educated at a university level, but that benefit is not purely practical. I don't think the point of getting higher education is getting a job.
--
I think the vast majority of us (I include myself) would be better off focusing on learning and finding meaning through work. I have learned to appreciate the finer things of life (literature, philosophy, art, music) outside the context of formal education, as I gained life experience and learned to reflect on that experience. I don't believe I could ever have appreciated philosophy as a 19 year old. I just did not have the life experiences to appreciate the questions it tries to ask. No professor can supply those experiences, and the best the system can do is to simulate it.
So the traditional University, seeking truth, would continue to exist, but people would go there when their life experience propels them towards it.
In crass business terms, we unbundle training in specific skills, the important task of earning a paycheck, from the abstract pursuit of truth. In that sense, the University becomes closer to how a religious institution operates today. Commercial job skills get to be imparted by commercially driven entities, with employers playing a prominent role.
This could dramatically alter the economics of providing those skills, as we have found out from Zoho University. We not only don't charge students, we actually pay them from day one, and yet, over a 3 or 4 year period, their dramatic gain in productivity effectively pays for the investment in skill building. Yes, this is not the "abstract pursuit of truth" but that needs to be unbundled.
Caveat: I'm a co-founder of Dev Bootcamp (http://devbootcamp.com), so I have strong opinions. :D
"The problem is this: somehow we mutated universities into a place where everyone goes in order to get a job."
No, I don't think that's fair. There's no "we." Everyone -- students and institutions -- have a different answer to "what is the purpose of an education?"
In the US, we've been experimenting with the full spectrum of answers for the last 150 years.
For some students "an education" is the promise of livelihood, for others it's about needs higher up on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Some reasons people "go to school":
* Access to expertise and high-quality curriculum
* Ability to connect with similarly-motivated people over an extended period of time (think: MBAs)
* Credentialing, or in general access to a certificate valued by the market
* Cultivating their own internal or external life, becoming a better person, citizen, etc.
None of these are better or worse than others, however these mandates often contradict each other.
I studied mathematics and linguistics at the University of Chicago and the thing I loved most about the university was that it had a very strong opinion about how to answer “What is an education?” That answer wasn’t for everyone, but the school was comfortable not being “for everyone.”
In my mind, by taking care of a small subset of those mandates, Dev Bootcamp helps free universities to have a strong opinion about that question again.
Sal Khan wants to call it a "new kind of college," which confuses things a bit. To me it's about understanding all the ways people answer the question "What is an education?" and unbundling those needs.
> No, I don't think that's fair. There's no "we." Everyone -- students and institutions -- have a different answer to "what is the purpose of an education?"
We have different answers, to be sure, but how is that answer expressed? The only thing my parents cared about when I chose my college and major was, "What kind of job can you get with that degree?" I was on good terms with the faculty and staff of my major and they felt compelled to acknowledge that most people worry about having a job when they leave school and thus, that faculty and staff felt obligated to explain the marketability of their taught skills, even if they had to go digging and networking with employers to find such answers.
You claim that, in the US, we have been experimenting for 150 years, but you only provide as an example your own, personal anecdotal experience as someone who has become a co-founding entrepreneur. You don't even provide UChicago's answer (which, had you done so, would have been an invitation for other alumni to disagree with you).
I don't see any meaningful experimentation happening. I see universities struggling to be everything to everyone, and not really having any idea how to do it anymore, except to provide for the lowest common denominator: the need to make a living after parental support runs out.
"I see universities struggling to be everything to everyone"
was exactly my point. :D
For some people, education is about "jobs," for others its about other things, and as a result universities have dozens of conflicting mandates.
I was rejecting the idea that we've somehow converged, as a society or whatever, on a consensus that education = jobs. That was not my educational experience. That's not the educational experience of people who attended an Ivy League school.
But I grew up poor and rural, so I know the flip side...viscerally. I meant to draw attention to exactly your point, that we've set up a situation where universities are directionless because we've asked them to be everything to everyone.
DBC is not everything to everyone. We hope that DBC will make it easier for universities to stop trying to be everything to everyone, too.
"You claim that, in the US, we have been experimenting for 150 years, but you only provide as an example your own, personal anecdotal experience as someone who has become a co-founding entrepreneur."
Happy to provide resources. :)
I'd start with Diane Ravitch's "Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform"
If you want names, I'd read up on the history of post-Civil War sociology, psychology, and philosophy in the US, especially the pragmatist tradition.
Start with John Dewey and William Torrey Harris (for a counterpoint to Dewey).
Here's a William Torrey Harris quote: "The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places ... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world."
Here's John Dewey: "The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences"
Also read up on Booker T. Washington and "industrial education."
Literally every point everyone has been making in this thread -- myself included -- was also being made by educational thinkers 100-150 years ago.
> I'd start with Diane Ravitch's "Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform"
I'll do that. I haven't read any of Ravitch's work directly yet, and enough time has passed since I heard her speak that I don't remember her position reliably anymore.
> Start with John Dewey and William Torrey Harris (for a counterpoint to Dewey).
I'm a fairly huge fan of John Dewey. I only barely hold back from calling myself a philosophical pragmatist in Dewey's tradition. On the other hand, I kinda recognize Harris' notion as a tradition I'd reject; Wikipedia's characterization of his supporters' arguments suggests that there isn't anything really useful in his ideas that doesn't require stripping it bare first. :P
> Literally every point everyone has been making in this thread -- myself included -- was also being made by educational thinkers 100-150 years ago.
But this is not experimentation. There is a difference between a thought experiment and an actual experiment. Schrodinger did not actually put a cat in a box and mysteriously wave his hands to express the quantum uncertainty of its aliveness.
Yes, we have some tiny movements like Montessori schools or project-based learning or Quest to Learn or KIPP's character training or charter schools and so on and so on, but they make such an infinitesimal impact and are often so incomparable that it doesn't make sense to call it "experimentation". The fact that Will Wright, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos are all Montessori graduates, for instance, gets noticed sometimes but also gets mocked a portion of that. (That is, the term "Montessori graduate" is sometimes used derogatorily.)
> I meant to draw attention to exactly your point, that we've set up a situation where universities are directionless because we've asked them to be everything to everyone.
I don't think that the answer is to unbundle it, though. That's an easy, dare I say Silicon-Valley-esque response to a difficult and multifarious beast, but it's not necessarily the right one. I think that it'd be worthwhile to shed some of those things, yes, but for their invalidity or overgeneralizations on their own merits, rather than because they detract from a university's capacity to be itself.
I am working on an answer myself, naturally... but I've so far declined to try to untangle the nature of a university on my own. It feels like putting the cart before the horse to do so. I've mostly held to a single, simple principle: a university experience should be optional. If people feel compelled to go to a university after some particular amount of basic education, such as high school, then the problems of a university are symptoms, not causes.
UChicago has a well-known reputation for being academic and focused on cultivating a "life of the mind," which is probably why jfarmer neglected specify an answer.
And your criticism of his expression of a personal anecdote is unwarranted. Virtually all of the opinions in this thread are going to be based on personal experience. As far as I'm aware, there are no statistics elucidating "the purpose of college." Your last paragraph, for example, is entirely a personal opinion/observation.
My criticism was that his example of 150 years' worth of experimentation was captured in a single personal experience. Unless he's at least 170 years old, what he said was basically ridiculous.
His reply is slightly better, but I'll get to that in a direct reply to him.
"The problem is this: somehow we mutated universities into a place where everyone goes in order to get a job."... That is indeed fair. The parent I assume is talking about the current general perception about universities in US.
My point was more that if you ask 20 people, "What is the purpose of an education?" you'll get 20 different answers -- everything from "to get a job" to "cultivate the life of the mind."
You may believe that, but the evidence from many surveys shows that it is not true. The vast majority of students and parents really do feel that the purpose of university is to "get a [better] job".
You can't just say "many surveys" and leave me hanging! :D
And just so I'm clear: I wasn't speaking literally. I did not mean, for example, "Surveys show that among 20 answers to the question, each answer received 5% of the responses within X margin of error."
I realize that's a risky thing to do on HN and still be understood.
I'm a big fan of Dev Bootcamp and similar startups. Traditional universities are a bad deal for students who are going to university to improve their ability to earn a livelihood - a not-insignificant portion of the 3/4 of Americans youths who now attend college. And it is becoming a worse deal as college costs increase.
Students need a more flexible, more accessible system of higher education. Over the last 50 years, we've attempted to co-opt the traditional university system to fill the higher education needs of the greater population and the experiment is failing.
A lot of our students come from backgrounds in higher education, so I want to be careful not to imply that places like Harvard, Oxford, etc. are for "some people" and others just can't meet their standards, so hey, why not set your sights lower and go to vocational school?
It's more that because we want universities to be everything to everyone, they've lost a sense of purpose. Some universities retain it -- Chicago, MIT, Harvey Mudd, Reed College, etc. -- and have incredibly strong opinions about how to answer "What is an education?"
Most universities can't afford to have a strong opinion, sometimes for legal reasons and sometimes for economic reasons.
By removing those contradictions, I'm hope Dev Bootcamp will help free universities to be universities again, and return to them the luxury of holding a strong opinion about the nature of an education.
You're forgetting the university as a place to get drunk, get high, get laid, and play football which appear to be pretty high priorities for many if not most students.
You're also forgetting the university as a rubber-stamp credential, an exclusive mark of membership into a particular subgroup of people we like to allow into our other particular subgroups, which from my anecdotal experience is the #1 reason parents want their kids to go to college.
The university as a "place of higher learning" was created back when monks copied every book by hand. I think the way we've managed to gold-plate all of the more modern and typical reasons for college with this lofty image thousands of years later is pretty impressive. By now I think we can probably come up with much better/cheaper forms of "higher learning" but I suspect too much of society depends on keeping it where it is.
> You're also forgetting the university as a rubber-stamp credential, an exclusive mark of membership into a particular subgroup of people we like to allow into our other particular subgroups, which from my anecdotal experience is the #1 reason parents want their kids to go to college.
It's true. Watching the difference in recruiters' reactions at a graduate career fair depending upon a candidate's undergraduate institution was sobering. For two equal graduate students, the student with an Ivy alma mater got all the attention. College is partially a filter. If you can get in and subsequently graduate, it guarantees a lower bound on competence.
> You're forgetting the university as a place to get drunk, get high, get laid, and play football which appear to be pretty high priorities for many if not most students.
So...? While these may not be my priorities, people who are paying through their nose to go to these schools are welcome to have other priorities. The thing is that just as elsewhere in life, there are people who would like to do different things with their money, I love the American experiment because it lets you do whatever you want with your money.
> You're also forgetting the university as a rubber-stamp credential, an exclusive mark of membership into a particular subgroup of people we like to allow into our other particular subgroups, which from my anecdotal experience is the #1 reason parents want their kids to go to college.
Uhhh...This is exactly how society works. Everyone makes first order approximations based on certain metrics. Hell, there are people out there who approximate based on the fact that you have a social media profile, have worked for google and play video games (Yes, even nerds ). The fact of the matter is that it is incredibly hard to judge people (Professionally and Personally) which is why we use these markers and throwing away universities is not going to make the markers themselves go away.
> The university as a "place of higher learning" was created back when monks copied every book by hand. I think the way we've managed to gold-plate all of the more modern and typical reasons for college with this lofty image thousands of years later is pretty impressive. By now I think we can probably come up with much better/cheaper forms of "higher learning" but I suspect too much of society depends on keeping it where it is.
I feel like what people are really looking for are tech shops that teach you how to do software engineering. Those are cheaper, more effective in teaching you how to do that specific task. The problem is that Universities are inherently designed to be a place where you are encouraged to make mistakes in the hope that you eventually get lucky and move humanity forward (This is the "higher learning" bit).
>> I don't think the point of getting higher education is getting a job.
This may be true for traditional students (18 year olds going right to college from High School who need to learn about life/ the world). But for lots of people, the goal of going to college is 100% to get a better job.
40% of college students today are non-traditional (older, single parent, works part time more than 35 hours per week, etc). These students aren't going to college for any other reason than getting hard skills they can use to get a job. Khan's vision is much better suited than the community colleges that primarily serve this segment now.
There's a bigger discussion here about whether you should need a college degree to get a job/ pay raise and there are lots of arguments that suggest that a college degree is overvalued. However, right now most jobs do require a degree so candidates need one to get hired (e.g., we were helping a company hire for admins -- some of the candidates had been admins for 20 years but the recruiters wouldn't look at their resume because they didn't have a college degree). Some professions also get a pay raise when they earn a degree (I believe teachers and police are among them but may be wrong).
Hmm, I know many non-traditional students who went to college because it was something on their bucket-list, not because they wanted a better job (they were happy with their career).
On the other-hand, for nearly every person I know who went to college straight out of highschool it was with the intention of improving job prospects.
>There's a tension right now between the university as a place to expand your mind and learn for the sake of learning and the university as a place where you prepare for a job.
I see this argument come up all the time. "You might be making more money than I am, but I have a degree, and that makes me a classy person."
It goes right along with the theory that college degrees are class markers, made ineffective by the large number of lower-middle class and poor folks mistaking cause for effect and mortgaging themselves in order to go to school.
The hard truth? For most of us, we can't afford to spend four years and a couple hundred grand "learning for the sake of learning." I have to work for a living. Sure, I enjoy reading in the evening, but even now, I couldn't afford to drop that kind of money and take four years off.
If your parents can't afford to just pay for your school? well, you had better learn something that you can use to earn money, 'cause those loans? they don't go away with bankruptcy.
So yeah; You (rather, those that say school should be about learning for the sake of learning, not learning so you can earn more money) need to acknowledge that if school is 'for the sake of learning' then it's irresponsible to ask the lower middle-class and the poor to mortgage themselves to attend. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with having a four-year long summer-camp for rich kids, but if that's what you want, say so.
(yes, I have been told that I have a 'Napoleon complex' about my lack of schooling. Sorry. But I do think what I say is true, even if the tone, perhaps, has more emotion than a reasoned argument ought. Spending the kind of time and money required to get a BA "for the sake of learning" if it doesn't increase your earning power, is something that only the children of the rich (and recipients of full-ride scholarships) can reasonably be expected to do.)
You (rather, those that say school should be about learning for the sake of learning, not learning so you can earn more money) need to acknowledge that if school is 'for the sake of learning' then it's irresponsible to ask the lower middle-class and the poor to mortgage themselves to attend.
I agree with that, but one obvious solution is that it shouldn't require mortgaging yourself to attend. Here in Denmark, universities are tuition-free, and students are actually paid a small stipend to attend, to cover living expenses. The intent is precisely to remove any link to parents' socio-economic status in who is able to afford to attend university.
Even in the U.S. it used to be somewhat closer to that. My dad came from a poor family and attended university without taking out any loans, because at the time ('60s), public universities had very low tuition, and even what low tuition existed could be covered by part-time work on campus (e.g. in the cafeteria or library).
I have been thinking schooling this week; More and more of the poor people I know have gone on to get real jobs lately, (The local job market is really hot, if you are a nerd, and nearly all of my friends and many of my acquaintances are smarter than I am[1] so it's really no surprise.)
I ended up using a craigslist ad to find someone to help me shovel out the office. The random I got had an IT-related degree from one of those schools you see advertised on daytime TV, and was having a hard time of it, even in these good times. (I mean, uh, she had windows experience, so not really my field, but someone has to maintain the exchange servers and desktops for all the people hiring my friends.)
>because at the time ('60s), public universities had very low tuition, and even what low tuition existed could be covered by part-time work on campus (e.g. in the cafeteria or library).
This is still true for community colleges and state schools. The problem is that a degree from one of those schools doesn't mean as much as a degree from a good school, (or really, from what I've seen, much at all,) precisely because it's something most people can get.
This supports my theory that degrees are about filtering rather than about learning.
My belief that a degree from a good school says that either you have rich parents, or you are smart, hardworking and have some hustle. With partial scholarships, this isn't a binary thing, of course.
The idea is, though, from an employers perspective, for a lot of jobs, having rich parents (and connections who are also the children of rich parents) can be just as useful as being smart and hard working.
But yea, if a degree is about filtering and not about learning, then obviously, a degree from a school anyone can get into is of dubious value.
Perhaps, from that perspective, what we want is a cheap school with a brutal dropout rate? But it's going to be hard to change the current status quo, as it works out pretty well for the elites; The rich pay big bucks to go to school with the best scholarship students. It's a fine system for the children of the rich (the quality of your peers, I think, has far more to do with educational quality than the quality of your teachers... and hell, if you are one of the elite, destined to control means of production? you /need/ to know competent people that can actually work.) It's also a great system for the smart people that make it on scholarships; they gain the contacts and access to capital that their birth denies them.
(I mean, as a coder, rich people contacts are generally less-useful. So I guess that means google and facebook should start focusing their recruiting efforts on people that went to good schools but didn't pay for it.)
[1]To be clear, I'm not stupid, but my own set of prejudices and my own brand of arrogance means that I don't have all that much tolerance for people noticeably dumber than I am. It's not a virtue; I recognize that I would be alone if many of my friends shared my prejudice.
This is still true for community colleges and state schools. The problem is that a degree from one of those schools doesn't mean as much as a degree from a good school, (or really, from what I've seen, much at all,) precisely because it's something most people can get.
Good state schools are still pretty valuable degrees, I think, but the problem is that the tuition isn't low anymore that those places. Community colleges are still affordable, but not so much the "flagship" state schools. In the '60s you could go to UCLA or Berkeley for basically nothing, but nowadays it's getting up towards $10k/yr. Same with places like UT-Austin or UW-Seattle.
Huh. Usually I've heard "state schools" to mean schools a tier lower than the UC schools. Like San Jose State would be a state school - both the prestige and the tuition are rather lower, though than a UC school like UCLA, or UC Berkeley, even though all are run by the same state.
Oh right, I see what you mean. It's possible I'm using the term wrongly. Maybe "public universities" is a better word? Basically I meant the "flagship" 4-year universities run by the states, of which each state typically has at least one or two (UT and A&M in Texas, Purdue and IU in Indiana, etc). Those used to be a common route to cheap but highly regarded education, because many are huge (e.g. Michigan State has 47,000 undergrads, Texas has 38,000), and they used to have only nominal tuition, plus enough work/study programs for students to pay their own room & board by working on campus. They're still cheaper, but no longer like that.
California does still seem to have one interesting option, at least for engineering: from what I can tell, Cal Poly SLO is formally a Cal State, and priced like a Cal State, but sort of a "premium" Cal State whose degrees are well-recognized among engineering firms.
You say that universities provide learners with a wider exposure to ideas. I don't doubt that this was true in the hundreds of years that universities have existed. However, up until 1989, universities basically had a monopoly on a place where it is easy to be exposed to many ideas. Since TBL invented the www, and hyperlinks became commonplace, it's never been easier to be exposed to ideas. It's far easier to come across new ideas on the internet than in any university in the world. All you need to be exposed to thousands of ideas is hyperlinks and intellectual curiosity.
The only feature that university has that the internet doesn't is a curriculum required to get a degree. However a required curriculum without intellectual curiosity isn't worth much. A required curriculum with intellectual curiosity is worth something. But now with phenomena like Wikipedia and MMOC's and a generation that has grown up online, the internet is most certainly overtaking universities.
I'm 30 years old and were I to do it again, I wouldn't go to university. I'm know I'm not alone in this sentiment, but I also know this isn't yet a majority sentiment. I expect a significant portion of the generation currently at uni that grew up with the internet to feel this regret when they are 30.
I agree that having a population highly capable of reasoning and critical thinking is a good thing. But I do think this vision of an enlightened society is a little bit of an ivory tower fantasy.
We don't live in a society where people have a large amount of freedom and exist as free independent agents.
Most people need to be employees. And if you are an employee you will exist in a dictatorship with a military-like structure, and doing critical thinking and proper reasoning will be downright dangerous.
"Um excuse me Mr. Manager, but your proposal for the future of the division has a logical error in the reasoning, and your conclusion is actually false"
Nope, Mr Manager is always right. Because you have to play the game of corporate politics if you want any chance of success, and avoid being labeled as difficult and abrasive.
As long as the large majority of job postings and companies are looking for obedient workers of a certain skill, most people will want an education to become an obedient worker of a certain skill. And universities need to adapt to demand in order not to have a decrease in applicants..
> We don't live in a society where people have a large amount of freedom and exist as free independent agents.
But should we? And if so, why may we not work towards it?
> And if you are an employee you will exist in a dictatorship with a military-like structure, and doing critical thinking and proper reasoning will be downright dangerous.
This is complete bullshit. You understand neither the military nor corporations, both of which can and do permit and encourage back talk.
Corporations only permit or encourage "back talk" when employees know what not to say or question. You are free to question policy or management decisions; you are not free to question certain organizational goals or the hierarchical structure of the corporation unless you happen to be in a high-level position (which most people will never be in).
That's true in every human organization. If you're constantly questioning our societal decision not to eat other people, you're not going to make any friends.
I think one of the results of going to university is that people learn critical thinking. Obviously, increasing the ratio of critical thinkers to the intuitive people in a society puts that society in a much better position.
While there are differences, fundamentally the proposition of mentors, internship-based learning, and living on site is not that different from apprenticeships. There's a wider exposure to ideas, perhaps (because maybe you jump between internships instead of staying with one), but at its most basic level the proposed idea is training people to do jobs instead of trying to expand their thinking minds. Yes, there's lip service given to seminars, but it's evident in the quote (“Traditional universities… list the Nobel laureates… ours… would list the… entrepreneurs, inventors, and executives”) that academics are held in a certain amount of contempt.
Let me be clear: I don't think there's anything wrong with this vision. This approach would probably be a success. It may be needed. The problem is this: somehow we mutated universities into a place where everyone goes in order to get a job. I think we benefit from having more people being educated at a university level, but that benefit is not purely practical. I don't think the point of getting higher education is getting a job. I think it's an extension of the same reason we go to school: because an educated population drives knowledge further. Because when a large part of the population gets a Bachelors of some sort, they can reason better. And because when there are more people at that knowledge level, a larger part than before gets a Ph.D. And that helps society and humanity move forward faster.
There's a tension right now between the university as a place to expand your mind and learn for the sake of learning and the university as a place where you prepare for a job. I think it's a good idea to play with that tension and that balance, and see what balance leads to better results in what way. But I think there is absolutely a place for universities as they are today, and I think their existence is part of what has driven us forward at the frenetic pace that we have seen the last several decades.