[forgetbook]

Forgive me for being suspicious of any invisible hand based argument.

I hope you'll be glad to hear that in my time, learning for its own sake is/was still seen as important, in humanities as much as any other area.

Freedom from the domination of financial considerations may be based more on individual conditions than systemic ones. There were certainly students worried about money in the 70's--it sounds like many of them are more accurately described as would-be students who simply didn't have the opportunity to attend at all. I do not fault today's would-be students who do have that opportunity for seeing their performance as tightly coupled to their livelihood.

(edit: to clarify, suspicion of an invisible hand argument means "if we can't articulate the cause, how are we purporting to know the effect?")

[hilbert42]

"Forgive me for being suspicious of any invisible hand based argument."

So am I, it's generally wheeled out in the absence of any other sufficiently-developed argument or alternatively as shorthand for one that's too hard to articulate. You're right, if we can't articulate the cause then we've little hope of moving forward.

I also don't fault today's students who consider their studies tightly coupled to their llivelihood, especially so in fields such as engineering.

Whilst I'm glad to hear that learning for its own sake is still seen as important the demise of humanities subjects at many universities in recent years doesn't overfill me with confidence that it will remain so.