I firmly believe that professors are the best, most-qualified people for training new professors. I also did not mean to imply that you need to have practical industry experience in order to be a skilled researcher and educator. Pragmatically speaking, there is no "industry" for most fields at a university (and for good reason.)

The problem is the fact that fewer than 10% of undergrads try to go to grad school, and the number of available professorships is optimistically many hundreds of times smaller than that.

University is only good for preparing you for a job you are never, ever going to get.

Edit: Let's clarify here. Are you referring to any course of study or only some? Well ranked schools or the average state school? I think it's an important distinction. An EE degree from Ohio State vs an EE degree from MIT is a huge ****ing difference in how prepared someone will be to work anywhere.

I'm not talking about fine arts, engineering, cs (as it's currently taught), any professional program or any course of study for which an industry exists.

I'm talking about the other 99% of available majors.

Oh, okay then.

If you're only considering university as a job-preparation service, then yes. If you're in a university in order to study the arts & sciences as an end in itself--i.e. if you're a member of the elite that universities catered to a century ago--then it can be a fantastic place.

Yeah but you have to have a college degree to be considered for this job. Which college degree you ask? Doesn't matter. We just want to know that you can wade through years of bull**** because someone tells you to. That is the primary qualification for this job.

Sounds like a boring and worthless job

Exactly.

Sounds like most jobs?

Sounds like America.

No, sounds like the first world

I considered tacking (westernized civilization) on to the end but then I realized that everyone else wants to be Merica because we have the best flag and the best music (country) and bigger steaks

yep. That's why all ideas are popular. Because they're better.

A much more troubling problem, in my opinion, is that attending school is now such a social necessity that the entire middle class is more than willing to blow not only all their wealth on it, but to go into massive debt. In a time where credentials are worth less and less.

It's an incredibly effective means for keeping the middle class from challenging anyone above them. Which, frankly, I don't really give a **** about because the 'middle class' is mostly undeserving, but it would be nice to have a majority of the population not partaking of a giant ponzi scheme, you know, for the sake of balance.

have absolutely no idea whether you took me seriously or not

I think Joncy is very right about . I think it really depends on the school, though. The people at my school tend to study finance and then look to and usually do work in a finance job, most of the time related to the finance classes they took. Usually after two years in that job they leave to do another finance (or related) job that isn't related to what they learn in school, but they start from there.

For the rest of my school, even though it is a very pre-professionally focused business school, many examples supporting Joncy exist. It tends to be that people know what they want to do out of school and take their coursework through the lens of that goal. For example, if somebody wants to be a consultant, that person might concentrate in marketing or management, join a student-constituted consulting firm at the school, take on clients looking for marketing consulting, and learn specific skills that way that then qualify them for large consulting firms. There are many consultants or marketers that were, for example, psychology majors. There are also many engineers that get swayed by the business-obsessed culture and recruit for business jobs (I have a MSE friend who graduated to work at Merrill Lynch in Japan, for example). There are IR majors and Bio majors who work at places like Accenture and Goldman Sachs because that's what everyone buzzes about during recruiting. More than anything, I think the culture of the school, rather than the course material taught at the school, influences where you go -- so going to a school can very much impact your future job choices and opportunities (just not necessarily through coursework)

(*I am not one of those finance people)

Also, congrats, Dash -- I have a few friends at Davis. It smells like cows but it will be fun