[growse]

The purpose of a university is research. They teach undergraduate courses so they can get more researchers to further academia. The university isn't interested in anything else.

If your goal is to maximize your earning potential, there's far more effective ways of spending 3-4 years.

[barry-cotter]

If the goal of a university was research it wouldn’t have any undergraduate students and it probably wouldn’t teach Master’s students either. Some external organization would educate future researchers and then they’d hire them.

So you’d either have a graduate studies only university, like the European University Institute in Florence or Rockefeller University or a research institute like the Max Planck Gesellschaft, RAND, SRI International or the Institutes for Advanced Study.

The idea that research is even a part of the core mission of universities is at most 200 years old. They’ve always been traded schools for theology, medicine and law and latterly finishing schools for the upper classes but the research university emerged in Germany with Alexander von Humboldt.

Most people don’t decide upon goals and then look for the most effective ways to pursue them. They look for the socially approved and known good ways of getting what they want. For the huge majority of university students that means they’re at university because they need a degree to get a job. People with money and people who attended selective universities may think otherwise because they have other or better options but most people know that if they want a decent, respectable living they better get their certificate of middle class membership, their Bachelor’s degree.

Outside of maybe Cal Tech no university sends the majority of its students on to graduate study aimed at producing researchers[1]. They are funded by governments whose voters would be apoplectic to be told education was an afterthought to faculty research. The median college graduate might be capable of doing a Master’s degree but there is no way more than 10% of those who matriculates as university students are capable of becoming researchers if that.

Whatever universities might be of their purpose is research they’re a terrible waste of resources.

[growse]

> If the goal of a university was research it wouldn’t have any undergraduate students and it probably wouldn’t teach Master’s students either. Some external organization would educate future researchers and then they’d hire them.

What makes you think that the best way of training future researchers isn't having the current researchers train them? This is the model currently used across most universities I think. As part of my degree, I was taught entirely by people who are active researchers in their fields.

> For the huge majority of university students that means they’re at university because they need a degree to get a job.

Yes, and I'd argue this is a negative trait. People should be going to university because they want to learn a thing, not because it's a necessary hoop to jump through to work in a field (unless that field is academia). Fields that require specialist education (law/medicine/etc) already have specialist institutions that do this vocational training.

> The median college graduate might be capable of doing a Master’s degree but there is no way more than 10% of those who matriculates as university students are capable of becoming researchers if that.

But how does the university find that 10%? You presumably can't select effectively, so what better way than to run a 3-4 year program for those who are interested to see if they remain interested enough and are good enough to become a researcher. It doesn't have to have a high conversion rate to be effective.

[lol768]

> The purpose of a university is research. They teach undergraduate courses so they can get more researchers to further academia. The university isn't interested in anything else.

Sorry, but this assertion is so incredibly wrong. At Warwick, where I did my undergraduate degree, 95% of students in my CS cohort were in a professional job 6 months after finishing the course - they're not staying around to do research! The courses are marketed based on earnings potential after graduation. Research grant income is dwarfed by tuition fee income. That's just how it is.

It's just laughable to suggest that universities aren't interested in teaching.

>If your goal is to maximize your earning potential, there's far more effective ways of spending 3-4 years.

I agree with this and it's one of the regrets I had.

[growse]

> Sorry, but this assertion is so incredibly wrong. At Warwick, where I did my undergraduate degree, 95% of students in my CS cohort were in a professional job 6 months after finishing the course - they're not staying around to do research! The courses are marketed based on earnings potential after graduation. Research grant income is dwarfed by tuition fee income. That's just how it is.

This is in no way contradictory to my original assertion. Of course universities recognize that they're going to lose people after their undergraduate course is finished. But more good quality people applying means more good quality people on the course, which ultimately means better researches. Obviously they'll market based post-degree earning potential, because that attracts better people.

Given a choice between an undergrad leaving for the real world and staying to do a postgrad, they'd always prefer the latter. Warwick would love that 95% figure to be 90%, or lower. An undergrad course where 100% of people left academia after they had completed it would not survive long.

> It's just laughable to suggest that universities aren't interested in teaching.

I worded this badly, but this is not what I suggested. Teaching is a core part of research, because teaching is how you get better researchers. My point is that universities are not interested in furnishing software companies with better quality developers.