This is my last free read this month on the HBR website - a fact that in itself demonstrates what's so wrong with the way things work today. But I digress. The article makes the oft-stated claim that people enter higher education because they want jobs. But that's wrong. Nobody wants jobs. They want the things they can get from jobs - a place to live, a family to share it with, well-being, self-expression. And that - according to economists - is what capitalism should have delivered by (say) 2030. But instead, as Malcolm Harris writes, "all of society is strapped in riding shotgun on the semi-criminal, semi-pathological drive to consume the future in advance, with no virtuous end on the horizon." HBR at least gets it sort of right near the end of the article: "universities tend to increase rather than decrease inequality." But nothing they suggest will fix that. Nothing in the concept of the university will fix that. But until it's fixed, universities remain the problem, not the solution. And the statistics suggest that people are beginning to get this.
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