[AtlasBarfed]

The issue is that humanities majors should be priced differently than other classes. The fact that "pre-professional" path classes cost the same as "frivolous" classes didn't matter much when college didn't cost THAT much.

Now? It's a stark decision of cost-benefit analysis.

I almost think that humanities need to be like hermit satellite institutions attached to the universities. You know, like universities were back in the day. Reduced expectations of funding and costs for attending those. The university gets the prestige, but doesn't have to shoulder as much cost. Or, they are separately endowed.

Humanities don't need the management that college administration uses to justify its explosive expansion. It doesn't have grants and all that. It just needs classrooms, some offices, and libraries. The dorms can be old-school if you want, part of the "academic experience".

The rest of the university, with its sport facilities, lavish living quarters, frats, grant-seeking labs, etc, whatever. Go exist. Over there. Grade inflation, cheatable classes, over there.

So there's two university experiences: the one where people go to get the job rubberstamp, and much cheaper but traditional (as in millenia old) experience of actual academic interest. Those can have separate admissions criteria.

I guess this is like what graduate students go through, which is what "real college" is kind of like, but why not provide a track that bypasses the crappy undergrad phase for those students (and they do exist) that demonstrate the academic interest? The key difference is that grad students have a massive undergrad debt, but then in grad school pay nothing or get paid subsistence wages.

Let's get rid of the massive undergrad debt for those that actually demonstrate academic interest. And let's be real, even in places like Harvard, that is probably a small minority of people going there.

[VLM]

The problem is we already have that. The market has spoken and if you get that English degree from Yale you'll be permitted to get one of the few jobs in the field with decent pay, but if you get the same degree from the same curriculum from reading the same texts and the same research journals at the state satellite campus down the road from my house, that more or less fully implements your suggestion, there are no jobs after graduation beyond Starbucks or maybe selling real estate. The price of the state satellite campus is lower than sticker for ivy leagues, but its still too high.

The real mystery is why non-credit Japanese taught by the same instructor in the same room using the same text and same syllabus on a different night of the week has a tuition of $45 but the for-credit class version of the same class is around $2K. I would guess the ivy league tuition equivalent of the same class would be $15K? The irony is the grads of all three expense levels are roughly equally skilled.