College used to be inexpensive enough that students could work their way through college on menial jobs without becoming laden with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Is it so much better now that one can justify the price increase?
I think not. I have seen depictions of colleges from the old days -- and the college classroom looked about as austere as a high-school classroom of similar time. What great infrastructure does one need for the old, reliable Great Books approach to education? Maybe the Great Books themselves are next to nothing in cost as downloads from Project Gutenberg. There could be some twentieth century writers whose works are not yet in the public domain (let us say Kundera)... but that should not pose much of a difficulty. Full literacy now requires exposure to film and other 20th-century media, so maybe a fully-educated person needs five years instead of four.
Colleges are preparing young adults to be members of some Leisure Class by exposing them to 'luxury' that never was a part of education. How large a Leisure Class can we afford? The focus was on preparation to be a full adult ready to take on grown-up roles in the economy. College grads might often end up with such unglamorous careers as "teacher", "circuit preacher", "fish and wildlife officer", "forest ranger", "traveling salesman", "county agricultural agent", or "librarian" -- but those all required some level of intellectual sophistication, and colleges had to accommodate such people who sought such careers. People may have been attending college because they knew that they could never tolerate the grinding, mindless sameness of factory work even if it paid better than "circuit preacher".
So colleges are competing with each other to offer nicer dorms, successful athletic teams, bigger libraries, more concerts by bigger stars, and better college sports teams? Why? Is such the purpose of education? Next thing you know they will start building horse tracks.
Anyone can learn materialistic hedonism. Just look at pimps and pushers. Know also why you aren't one of those scum even if you are a file clerk with a huge student loan to pay off.
Besides picking on the phrase "materialistic hedonism" what is so sage about this?
