To expand on that, the more educated your neighbor is, the more productive and capable they are, and the better off you are. Do you want poor, unskilled, uneducated customers, vendors, employees, neighbors, and fellow citizens? Or skilled, prosperous, educated ones? Do we want to return to the Middle Ages?
>Do we want to return to the Middle Ages?
I'll take the universal literacy of modernity, but there's actually a lot to learn from apprentice-based systems in previous centuries.
Good for them, but it's an anecdote. People with bachelors degrees make 70% more, per the article.
So there has to be some middle ground between "everyone must get a bachelor's!!" and "start shop class at 15, you'll be fine"
1. Universities have long been tied to visible activism -- the fact that we're at the high point of a wave now isn't particularly meaningful. There is no systemically disruptive "unrest" in universities -- classes go on, degrees are being earned.
2. The feelings thing seems like your perception. Yes, more visible and provocative and simply unusual speech occurs at universities. By gross volume, there may be more feelings-based reasoning that you perceive in universities. But compared to the cultural mainstream, critical thinking is much more visible and prevalent at universities -- it is, in fact, required a lot of them time.
Why not? At lease Charlemagne could almost read and promoted education.
Specifically, ggp that you're referring to was expanding on reasons why education is good beyond it's connection to the job market.
The only extent to which people are conflating degrees and education is the empirically obvious observation that most people don't get much actionable education beyond their time in degree programs, individual counterexamples notwithstanding.