Dead Horse College

A World of Diplomas - Ezra Klein

"This demonstrates how rigid the credentialing mentality has become in higher education, trumping three decades of undisputed good work. It wasn't always that way. When Ludwig Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929, they simply accepted his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a doctoral thesis. The knew that forcing him to go through a formal course of study to earn a credential would be absurd. They were acting in their role as certifiers of learning, which is (see the post below) not necessarily the same thing as being a provider of learning."

Not to beat a dead horse, but I thought this quote of Kevin Carey via Ezra Klein deserves some notice, not least because of its mention of my favorite philosopher Wittgenstein. The point is that since Wittgenstein had already proven himself he didn't need classroom education. The purpose of college education is to further an already fruitful mind, not simply certify this person for a particular set of jobs. But the way college degrees are treated it has become the high school degree of thirty years ago. Now graduate school has become the arena for pushing the mind further while undergraduate work has become an extension of high school.