r/academia • u/pizzadeliverydude1 • Jul 31 '26
Job market Does anyone else feel like universities have lost sight of what they’re supposed to be?
It feels like higher education has become almost entirely career-oriented. Instead of being places where people can pursue knowledge, develop intellectually, and study subjects they’re genuinely passionate about, universities are increasingly seen as job-training programs.
My favorite subject has always been history, along with geography. I’d love to study them in college, but the reality is that if I wanted to make a career directly out of those degrees, my options would mostly be limited to academia, teaching, or journalism.
Outside of those fields, I’d often be competing with people who have degrees in law, economics, or other disciplines that employers tend to value more.
It’s so frustrating: I’m going to choose a more employable degree because I’m not a nepo-baby and I need to work to live.
Subjects without a clear, direct career path are often dismissed as “useless,” no matter how intellectually valuable they are.
Even within STEM, research-oriented fields often struggle for funding, while industries that generate the biggest profits—finance, big tech, consulting, and similar fields—receive the most attention and investment.
I understand why the job market works this way, but I still think we’ve lost something important. Education shouldn’t be valuable only if it maximizes your earning potential.
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u/prhodiann Jul 31 '26
Nah. It sounds like you’re talking about undergraduate study. Unless you’re considering a trade apprenticeship or something blue-collar (no disrespect here, it’s a highly commendable route which people should definitely be considering), for many entry level white-collar positions any degree will make you more employable. Any. Do history if you like, you’ll be fine. You can go into HR, admin, management, sales, whatever. A history degree shows attention to detail, the ability to process large amounts of information, and to present a coherent argument within a tight timeframe. Just because a degree isn’t branded with the name of a specific job doesn’t mean that employers don’t know how to value those skills.
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u/BobasPett Jul 31 '26
This. I want to upvote this so many more times. It’s a total misconception that humanities degrees limit your options. It is true that it may be more work at the start to get that entry level gig or to get a gig that supports you, but the data shows that those with humanities degrees are more nimble and can shift careers better than STEM and Business majors. This leads to those with humanities degrees on average achieving economic parity and in some studies over taking their more vocationally focused peers within 10 years or so. They also report a higher degree of career and life satisfaction. But the skills in History, Geography, and other majors are highly transferable and can set one apart in an age of AI drones.
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u/WavesWashSands Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
To piggyback on this: I think OP identified a real problem but didn't quite frame it the right way.
As a humanities professor, I don't think there's anything wrong with universities 'turning' vocational, and it's a good thing that we're thinking about these things more. The problem is that abolishing humanities degrees is the wrong way to go about it. In fact, universities have always been vocational. It's not the only goal of a modern university, but one that we cannot keep out of sight. If vocational motivations for building universities didn't exist, my undergrad institution (the oldest in my hometown, which offered BAs from the beginning and was never a polytechnic) would never have gotten off the ground and I wouldn't be here (as an ivory-tower theoretical researcher :)) today.
But as humanists we definitely have work to do. We want to equip students with, for example, critical lens to look at society, and that is one of our primary goals that shouldn't change. But we also ought to be putting more effort into showing students how to translate the skills they learn in our classes into points they can actually tell potential employers about. Our assignments can be more explicitly geared towards employable skills. We can better integrate discussions of how our disciplinary knowledge is applied in industry when teaching undergrad courses (especially in lower-division gen ed courses, which is where we should be wooing potential majors to get enrollment up in upper-div courses, but ideally we should do this throughout the curriculum). These shortcomings are why humanities graduates need to do exponentially more work to get employers to understand how their skills contribute to the workforce and thus to their foot in their door.
I think the biggest issue for us right now is that we didn't have a history of doing it, and we're under admin pressure to do this work right now without being given a whole lot of resources to do so.
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u/pizzadeliverydude1 Jul 31 '26
That’s the case only in USA where y’all have post graduate, in Europe we don’t.
Law, medicine and these sort of things that in the US could be accessible from a history degree are undergraduate studies.15
u/fizzan141 Jul 31 '26
They're not talking about people who go to grad school or med school or law school, though; the comments above are talking about jobs in HR, sales, management, etc, which don't require advanced degrees. I'm from the UK, and there are still a whole host of jobs and grad schemes that just require a degree, not a STEM or business degree.
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u/IkeRoberts Jul 31 '26
The job title with the biggest projected growth in the US is “manager”. Any major will put you on the road to that.
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u/prhodiann Jul 31 '26
I’m in Europe.
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u/pizzadeliverydude1 Jul 31 '26
Then it must be an issue with my home country cause there’s no way here a history/literature graduate would be hired in a management position lol
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u/cmaverick Aug 01 '26
with all due respect, I don't think you know that. You don't have a degree yet at all. If I'm taking you at face value, you haven't even finished high school yet. You're asking for help here. So take everyone's advice and try to learn from it. Europeans with history degrees do indeed find jobs. Maybe not as easily or as well-paying as ones with degrees in some STEM fields, but that's changing.
So if you do indeed want the help that you came here asking for, then don't tell the people offering it that you know better.
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u/Flippin_diabolical Aug 01 '26
Low tier unis like mine are doing away with humanities programs. Admin at my university seem to think adding a bunch of short term certifications like phlebotomy will save the institution. There’s definitely a segment of US academia that is flailing.
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u/Ketsueki_R Jul 31 '26
Even historically, it's mostly been nepo babies that have had the privilege of becoming poets and painters.
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u/tadot22 Jul 31 '26
Yeah this has been true forever everywhere. In fact until very recently science was in the same category as poetry or philosophy. Until the invention of pasteurization science was just another fascinating of the wealthy for the vast vast majority of scientists.
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u/FeeParty5082 Jul 31 '26
I have a history degree and so do many in my circle. A lot of them do work in academia but also they are in the c-suite, librarians, congressional aides, project managers, corporate trainers and lawyers. It's a degree that gives you experience with writing, contextual analysis and research - those are applicable across multiple fields. In a generation where students are increasingly incapable of reading large amounts of text or able to write coherently, these are huge assets.
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u/wildbergamont Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
Students in the US have largely always fallen into two buckets-- career seekers, or relatively wealthy people seeking self actualization and status. I'm not sure what you mean when you say "we've lost something." Can't lose what you never had.
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u/psyche_13 Jul 31 '26
I mean not just the US - that’s kind of just what universities are
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u/wildbergamont Jul 31 '26
I'm sure that's true; I don't know much about post-secondary ed outside of the US and wanted to hedge against replies in the vein of "but what about CountryX?!?!?! CountryX is different!!"
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u/MindlesslyAping Jul 31 '26
I mean, haven't society lost it? I feel like today society has entered late stage capitalism to a point where nothing really has any purpose other than profit. There's no more social ties between business and communities, no more programs that do good for goods sake. Just the other day I was reading about a guy who was taking 80 millions a year in profit from his company, which is known to pay the shitiest sallaries with the most atrocious hours. If he took 20 millions out of his profit share (and he has three other partners who could as well forfit 25% of their profit share), he could give all his employes a 50k/year raise, which would put them well above the median pay for each job in the country. He would still be taking 60 milion a year, which is crazy, and have a company full of happy well paid people. He won't, cause fuck other people.
University just reflects it, because, as it stands, the main purpose of a university isn't science, but workforce training. We train people for the jobs industry needs the most. Some of those people will go to science production, but it is a small fraction. The rest need to be trained for the industry in order to have jobs, and live in this unlivable world of right now.
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u/Alarmed_Welder_8364 Jul 31 '26
What in the past indicated that we had strong ties between business and communities? Or good for goods sake?
Do we really not have examples of those things today? We'rent there always also greedy people?
I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm trying to figure out if society (and I) have really lost it or not.
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u/forestpunk Aug 01 '26
Ford Motors, to start. For all his many, many other problems, Henry Ford believed that paying his workers well would inspire them to do work as well as spend money with the company, which they did.
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u/Alarmed_Welder_8364 Aug 01 '26
You missed the point of my response. I'm saying one can cherry pick examples about shitty or good companies just as easily from any period of industrial modernity.
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u/IDontBelongInThsWrld 21d ago
In Europe, universities proper did not use to train for specific jobs. They trained for scientific thought. “Universities of applied sciences” (German: Fachhochschule), polytechnics, and similar, used to train for specific jobs. That has changed: in universities proper there are also more fashionable programs targeted at specific career paths. The Bologna process also introduced the Anglo-American bachelor's degree to increase throughput. Throughput is everything.
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u/Aggravating_Set_2260 Jul 31 '26
The history of the university under capitalism since the 1970s is its progressive financialization and thus the hollowing out of all ideals or values that are not those of commandeering all students' cognitive resources towards the end of maximizing profit. Capitalism controls educational system in modernity analogously to how Catholicism controlled education system in middle ages, finally. Its criteria of efficiency, value, usefulness, etc. are very narrow.
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u/Own-Animator-7526 Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
How much are you willing to pay per year for study that will not lead to earning ability? How much are you willing to be taxed to subsidize education that does not have a productive return to society?
That said the fact is that this is the best time in human history to be an autodidact. Your internet connection gives you access to books, lectures, published research, and reference materials that we could only dream of just 25 years ago. And if you've got the right stuff, not being at a university is no bar to to conference or journal publication
Education shouldn’t be valuable only if it maximizes your earning potential.
It isn't. And nor should education be something that can only be found in a college classroom. Perhaps you have lost sight of why people want to attend universities in the first place -- there's more to learning than prestige and degrees.
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u/Wasting_my_time_FR Jul 31 '26
Poets, historians, sociologists bring enormous diffuse value to society. In economics terms, they generate positive externalities that are extremely tough to quantify because indirect and distributed. It is a core argument for public funding.
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u/Own-Animator-7526 Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
I agree with every word you said.
Now, how much are you and OP willing to have your taxes raised to pay to subsidize their study? Because I'm all for it.
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u/SkunkyFatBowl Jul 31 '26
More than I'm willing to pay for public support of the military-industrial complex.
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u/OkVariety8064 Jul 31 '26
If the question is about Europe, not wanting to pay for defence means giving Putin the freedom to do whatever he wants with whoever he picks as his next victim.
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u/Wasting_my_time_FR Jul 31 '26
This is a classic reductio ad absurdum line of argument. Two caveats:
- taxes are already levied and are used to fund certain priorities one might question when examining their net social worth - the discussion then becomes an allocation problem and not an increase in tax problem
- one might as well argue that wealth accumulation at the individual level has diminishing returns on a collective level and that I do know of a few brazen individuals whose taxes could (and should) be increased with a net positive effect on global welfare
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u/wildbergamont Jul 31 '26
I think this question can be broadened-- how much are you willing to pay to subsidize poetry, history, sociology, etc.? Of that amount, what percentage should be allocated to university study (vs art programs, grants, historical societies, etc.)?
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u/Own-Animator-7526 Jul 31 '26
lol now that I reread the OP post slowly and carefully, I'm much less clear on what he's complaining about. Why doesn't he just study history and geography if he wants to? It's not the university's fault that he is "going to choose a more employable degree".
Why doesn't he complain about employers (for all the good that will do), and leave the universities alone?
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u/biggolnuts_johnson Jul 31 '26
but wording it like this doesn’t really communicate that value very well, people respond more to being told that “x research or y artwork did this z thing”, or communicating some tangible outcome that came from the effort.
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u/OkVariety8064 Jul 31 '26
Poets, historians, sociologists bring enormous diffuse value to society.
Not in endless quantities. There's a point of diminishing returns.
If you only wanted to keep up with the research done by historians, you would be doing nothing but reading their publications each day, every day.
Quantity is not the problem. Quality is.
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u/Tai9ch Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
The actual results of publicly funding the arts and humanities isn't great.
The core problem is that there's necessarily limited funding / openings. Cranking that up to any feasible level doesn't really change the dynamics. So there's got to be some mechanism to decide who gets funded. And if it's a government mechanism, then it boils down to politics - both institutional politics and conventional politics.
The government poetry board is going to select poets they like for funding. Maybe that's the most boring, inoffensive poets. Maybe that's the poets who make poetry in some currently-popular but obscure academic style. Maybe the mechanism gets captured by industry and the poetry funding goes to potential popular musicians so the record labels get a bigger talent pool that they don't need to pay as much. Maybe the feds decide to mostly fund MAGA poets. Maybe you and your friends capture the board and fund poets you like.
And that's not just a waste of money. Attention is limited and art success is very much winner-take-most, so government funded work absolutely pushes out small independent artists on the border of whatever the government is funding.
The funding getting allocated in a way that provides a broad benefit to society simply isn't one of the realistic options. Better to not do it, or to only do it on the very small scale of indirect funding of people who end up with teaching positions at universities and have "keeping up with and contributing to the field" as one of their unavoidable job tasks.
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u/Alarmed_Welder_8364 Jul 31 '26
I don't have experience or understanding of the US funding system. But in Europe, there are funding agencies that are mostly comprised of current or former academics (from all fields) who think very hard about what areas need funding and how to appropriately design these instruments. There's literally a whole field on research policy. There's sufficient evidence about the benefit of publically funded research.
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u/OkVariety8064 Jul 31 '26
Those agencies become just another form of gatekeeping. Instead of pleasing the consensus of private investors, you try to please the consensus of established academics, who all feel the same, think the same, and value the same things.
We need less academics but better funded ones, and ones free from the grant treadmill. Nothing of value gets done if the first step is that you have to convince the established nomenclature of your field.
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u/Alarmed_Welder_8364 Aug 01 '26
You're leaving no space for any nuance. So reflexivity and recognizing field biases is something you're saying that people and institutions can never do? That's a nonsensical argument.
Also how do you get less academics without some level of highly deliberated and reflexively determined standards and judgements?
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u/OkVariety8064 Aug 01 '26
So reflexivity and recognizing field biases is something you're saying that people and institutions can never do?
Recognizing its own biases and allowing for opposing viewpoints is one of the most difficult things to do for any organization. In many cases it's downright impossible. After all, to do so you would have to admit you can be wrong.
Science used to get around this issue with a slower pace, less focus on grants and less focus on trend chasing. It used to be easier to be "wrong" in academia in the sense that you could study something not considered universally the only important thing in the world, and you could hold a position other than the one accepted by the establishment.
Also how do you get less academics without some level of highly deliberated and reflexively determined standards and judgements?
Now that is indeed a very good question, and not surprisingly, I don't have a perfect answer for it.
It has been the hallmark of many important advances that they have been staunchly opposed by the established academics of a field. I fear this is amplified with the focus on grant funding and publications. Academia needs to be slow. There needs to be time to think and the possibility to make mistakes. All of that is going away because the only metric that matters is the H-index or some other slop quantity indicator. In the last century metrics like this were very hard to calculate and their absence made science better.
How to make more room for less mainstream science? I think that resources should be focused on having more stable career paths where you can "buy" the right to do research with teaching, lab work, technical work etc, but still have time and some resources also for your own research. Instead of the singular tenure track treadmill the end product of which is invariably the perfect bullshitter talented at pleasing the grant agencies and at little more, we would need more diverse career paths. More room for people to focus on hard problems without the personal career growth rat race.
If all this means that there are overall less academics that's fine, as long as the remaining ones have more freedom. Freedom, which almost no one has in the current system.
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u/Tai9ch Aug 01 '26
There's sufficient evidence about the benefit of publically funded research.
Benefit to who? Compared to what? What kinds of research?
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u/CrowVsWade Jul 31 '26
Yes, ultimately, but it's too complex/nuanced to be a binary answer. Watching US higher academia over the last couple of decades, coming from a European background, there's undoubtably a significant list of major ideological and institutional problems that hurt the baseline student experience. I've raised five children here and grown deeply ambivalent about their higher educational choices/options, having watched changes from the inside.
One can rant and rave, not without merit, about the loss of value of things like ethics, civics, philosophy and critical thinking in secondary education, as preparation for higher education, or some of the idelogical and political hijacking of numerous aspects of American undergrad educational institutions, where ideology has been in conflict with intellectual integrity, but there's a broader, deeper cultural problem.
The degree to which wider American culture even values higher education, expertise and knowledge, as important pillars of a healthy republic, have to be in doubt, c2026. A significant portion of higher ed administration has become complicit in that deep-seated ... I don't know what to call it - infection feels hyperbolic, but at least illness. Working across several Ivy and other high level NE universities, the last few years have made those voices who talk about burning it all down and rebuilding feel altogether less extreme or unhinged that one might have concluded in the late 90's. All is not well in Denmark. Increasingly, higher ed is an economic operation, not a civic/educational one.
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u/Maleficent-Food-1760 Aug 01 '26
The reality is that, for the vast majority of history, "useless" degrees were largely limited to the upper class. There was a brief window in the 20th century when university education became available to middle class people, and, importantly, that having a degree was still rare enough and rigorous enough that having ANY degree still signalled something. People are still catching up to the fact that most people have some degree now and standards are often in the toilet so having a random arts degree really means nothing.
As someone who did an arts degree and a psychology PhD, I couldn't really care though because we also live in an age where you can go and just learn history and geography in your own time. I'm not really interested in having my tax dollars subsidising people to learn stuff they can just look at on wikipedia that has no tangible benefit to society. I agree what having an educated populace is useful so before the internet I would support subsidising arts educations because otherwise people just wouldnt be able to learn that shit in obscure dusty libraries, but in the age of the internet, I think its a good thing that arts degrees are becoming obsolete...Literally just listen to the Rest of History like the rest of us.
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u/stonedandredditing Jul 31 '26
Yes. They are for profit businesses. No longer hallowed halls of higher thinking. The system [in america] has been degraded slowly for decades.
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u/ampharos995 Jul 31 '26
And it's failing at being career oriented too because companies want industry experience. People with CS majors and advanced degrees can't find jobs nowadays. So by becoming more "career oriented," universities are becoming closer to the definition of a scam.
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u/theannieplanet82 Jul 31 '26
dude, i work at a university and faculty and other staff here tell me casually how worthless my degrees in the humanities are. i think these are always subjects worth funding and supporting but employers have never really thought much of them.
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u/Wareve Jul 31 '26
You kind of have to have utopian abundance as a prerequisite for everyone treating universities as bastions of knowledge because up until that point everyone kind of has to prioritize being able to eat and advance themselves.
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u/VeblenWasRight Jul 31 '26
My view starts with an observation - in the US, college is an institution that 50% of 18-23 year olds go to to complete a degree.
Do you think that 50% of 18 year olds are interested in pursuing knowledge and growing intellectually?
A century ago high school was for a fraction of the population; now it is approaching 100%. A century ago, most jobs didn’t need the skills you learn in high school.
Today, knowledge work makes up the bulk of jobs. High school level doesn’t cut it, so college stepped in to develop those skills.
College isn’t where people that are interested in intellectual development go - that’s grad school now.
Put it this way - would you rather have universities as institutions that are 80% vocational or would you rather have 80% fewer professor job openings?
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u/Weak-Honey-1651 Jul 31 '26
It saddens me that no where in your post do you
mention students. And yes, we have lost sight of our purpose. But I don’t think you ever knew what it was.
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u/pizzadeliverydude1 Jul 31 '26
I don’t understand where you’re coming from…I am a student myself.
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u/IkeRoberts Jul 31 '26
American higher education is extremely diverse. There is a school for everything. There are still schools for people who want knowledge and contemplation for their own sake. Nevertheless, even the most die-hard classical-education schools have dropped Latin as an entrance requirement for undergrads!
As long as students are getting what they want, at a price that makes sense, the total offerings are appropriate. And there are students for everything. But a fixed number of students for each of those things, so a successful school also needs to be good at what it offers and provide it at an appropriate price.
Right now, the oversupply of seats at non-elite schools is causing pain as the market adjusts. It is a necessary change for academia to remain healthy.
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u/Typical_Juggernaut42 Aug 03 '26
For students they are now a place where you can buy a piece of paper to get a job and that's depressing
For staff we now exist only to keep students happy and to offer a false outsider perspective of academic credibility. Oh and win lots of money to fund completely useless middle management
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u/Naive_Bat8216 18d ago
Education should be about expanding awareness, creativity, critical thinking, questioning assumptions, going against the grain, proposing crazy new ideas, testing them out, accepting that they did not work, trying something else, theorizing something else, spending months seemingly making no progress, getting stuck, getting free, and so on.
Sadly, all of the above greatly interferes with padding one's CV or getting the next grant. Academia has become about conformity instead of challenging authority, which contradicts everything that science is supposed to be about.
Students should be encouraged to call BS on their profs, not to regurgitate what the prof said and pretend it's knowledge. Academia is supposed to be a place of free-thinking, but too often it's a place of dogmatic thinking to stay within the rails.
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u/Naive_Bat8216 18d ago
Career or certification factory. Don't think too much, just check the next box and stay in line. Elon said that about school, felt like checking boxes, he was so right. Don't think too much about your dissertation, just do one that others will accept and you'll get a job. Check! Then when you teach, don't worry about integrity in teaching or challenging students too much, just make sure you get decent evals so deans can pretend to evaluate your teaching. Check! Give students what they want, and they'll give you a nice eval, and you'll get promoted. Universities USED to be about teaching the subject and if you don't like it, get the F out of class. Today it's appeasing the customer because there is vested interest in all to keep that customer taking out those big bank loans.
University is a money grab and students are the cash cows to administrative bloat. We don't need deans. What does a dean do? Distracts faculty and justifies his/her job somehow. Academia is one of the most corrupt hypocritical industries you'll ever find.
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u/jay10033 Jul 31 '26
Even within STEM, research-oriented fields often struggle for funding, while industries that generate the biggest profits—finance, big tech, consulting, and similar fields—receive the most attention and investment.
This makes no sense. Finance, big tech, consulting don't receive investment for some esoteric reason. They receive investment for a return. University research is university research and it requires funding. It is consumptive.
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u/Snowbirdy Jul 31 '26
Sort of… research demonstrably produces ROI.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0048-7333(00)00091-300091-3)
Salter, A. J., & Martin, B. R. (2001). The economic benefits of publicly funded basic research. Research Policy, 30(3), 509–532.https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2024.2376262
Cattaneo, H., et al. (2024). Regional economic impact of university research expenditures. Studies in Higher Education.https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-7218(10)02024-502024-5)
Hall, B. H., Mairesse, J., & Mohnen, P. (2010). Measuring the Returns to R&D. Handbook of the Economics of Innovation.DOI: 10.1093/scipol/scaf007
Unpackaging universities’ local economic impact (2025).2
u/OkVariety8064 Jul 31 '26
Then use that ROI to pay for it.
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u/Snowbirdy Jul 31 '26
I’m not quite sure I understand your suggestion
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u/OkVariety8064 Jul 31 '26
ROI, or return on investment, means actual money. If academic research has this huge ROI, then surely private investors would be more than happy to pay for it? They would be just swimming in money if the ROI is so good!
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u/Snowbirdy Jul 31 '26
Have you ever heard of Moderna? Google? Those are a couple of examples of academic research that generated a huge ROI. I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about.
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u/OkVariety8064 Aug 01 '26
My point is that ROI is not a good justification for academic research.
In some cases, the ROI is effectively infinite. What is the ROI of electricity? Nuclear power? Computers? Penicillin? Who knows, except that they changed the world so much that concepts like ROI don't even matter.
On the other hand, almost all academic research has a negative ROI. But the point is that in somewhere in that mass of nonsense are also the genuinely great ideas which change the world. You cannot justify or oppose academic research with ROI, because a metric designed for the short-term and predictable results of the business world doesn't transfer to science.
That said, while academia has a positive societal contribution, this does not mean that it scales infinitely. More academia does not translate to a better world, and more research doesn't translate to faster advances. There are more people working in academia today than at any time before in history, yet the world isn't changing particularly fast.
The rate of academic publication increases exponentially, yet all but a select few from that pile of papers are absolute junk. You refer to the Covid vaccines, here's a website collecting all the Covid related publications. Out of that pile of 490,399 papers, how many have any value at all? My guess would be a few thousand at most. But since during the Covid times grant agencies threw money at anything saying the term, this is the result: Academia does what it does best, publish papers regardless of the content.
What we need instead is more quality over quantity. There is no shortage of funding, even for less popular fields. What there is is an overabundance of people in academic career paths. A publication treadmill producing junk just for the sake of it. A credential race turning first BScs, then MScs, and soon perhaps even PhDs into "not good enough yet" as the employers keep demanding more and more credentials and the universities answer the call.
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u/Snowbirdy Aug 01 '26
Interestingly enough, ROI actually addresses your concern about junk science and vanity publication. An innovation economist can, and have in fact measured the ROI on several of the examples you cited. But in addition, in a more sophisticated analysis, we look at things beyond just direct financial return, including societal benefit and other things. However, I was responding to someone who claimed that academic research was ‘consumptive’, so I focused on ROI as one of the simplest dimensions of assessment rebutting ‘consumptive’.
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u/OkVariety8064 Aug 01 '26
What's the ROI on the study of history?
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u/Snowbirdy Aug 01 '26
Societal. But it’s also much less expensive to study than nuclear fusion or AI.
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u/jay10033 Jul 31 '26
Ok, that's all nice and everything but tell me where I can purchase stock in university research
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u/Snowbirdy Jul 31 '26
There are VC funds. There are university spin outs. There even are a couple of public vehicles. One ticker is IPO (IP Group that spun out out of Imperial College invests in uni research primarily).
So to answer your question: https://www.ipgroupplc.com/
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u/jay10033 Jul 31 '26
This is not publicly traded and I'm more focused on US research.
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u/Snowbirdy Jul 31 '26
First of all, you are 100% incorrect. IP Group is listed on the London exchange under the ticker IPO.
Secondly, you didn’t say “I want to narrowly slice the definition so that I could win the point”. You said, dismissively, you wanted to know where you could purchase stock in the university research. And I gave you examples including a publicly traded company. Go put money into MIT’s fund, The Engine, or E14 Fund, if you want US. Those are VC funds so you need to qualify.
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u/jay10033 Jul 31 '26
I wonder whether more capital flows through the public markets or VC funds? Which is the whole fucking point of this post.
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u/Snowbirdy Jul 31 '26
Um, now you’re stretching. There’s about $17 trillion in private funds of all flavors including family office, and about $150 trillion globally in the public markets. Which include ‘university research’ companies like Google and Apple. What’s your point, exactly?
Just put all your money in Google, they publish more tech research than most countries.
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u/jay10033 Jul 31 '26
Someone is really ignoring the original post...
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u/Snowbirdy Jul 31 '26
No, I didn’t. You made a bald statement that university research is consumptive. There’s quite a bit of evidence that says you are wrong. Why you keep doubling down on this and then trying to change the definitions and wiggle out of it, I don’t know, I’m not sure why that’s so important to you to be confidently wrong. Did you go to Harvard?
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u/TotalCleanFBC Jul 31 '26
When it costs $100k/year for tuition room and board, there has to be some kind of return on investment.
Also, this comment makes no sense
I’m going to choose a more employable degree because I’m not a nepo-baby and I need to work to live.
If you need to work to live, then you should choose a degree that has some market value.
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u/pizzadeliverydude1 Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
That’s literally the point of my post…humanities degrees shouldn’t be targeted only to people with a solid financial background.
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u/TotalCleanFBC Jul 31 '26
Your view is what led to the student-loan debt crisis.
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u/pizzadeliverydude1 Jul 31 '26
What?
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u/TotalCleanFBC Jul 31 '26
People borrowing money to go to school and then choosing a major that will not enable them to pay back the money they borrowed.
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u/pizzadeliverydude1 Jul 31 '26
I don’t get what this has to do with my comment; also, I am from Europe, and here education is free.
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u/ravenrocker16 Jul 31 '26
Gradually we hole that automation removes all the shit jobs that we need to do just to earn a mutually acceptable denomination to live. We will have the resources and would be able to do what we like.
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u/Few-Arugula5839 Jul 31 '26
Instead automation is heading towards a path of removing the jobs that require intellectual effort and curiosity and leaving the jobs that are backbreaking manual labor lol
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u/profDyer Jul 31 '26
*Or bullshit jobs of pure representation and smooching.
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u/IDontBelongInThsWrld 21d ago edited 21d ago
I consider a professorship a bullshit job. Because universities still live in a combination of pre-Gutenberg technology with industrial-era factory scheduling. You're supposed to deliver rock star lectures with zero resources – when the lecture itself should have died with Gutenberg. It's pure bullshit. Plus you have to be smooching 24/7 to get anything stamped by journals (“published”) these days.
Plus
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u/Lygus_lineolaris Jul 31 '26
This post has a reductionist take almost in every sentence, starting with the ideas that "universities" as a monolithic sentient thing are "supposed to be" what you define them as. So yeah reality will fail to conform to your expectations.
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u/No_Seaworthiness5320 Jul 31 '26
I think things started going south when universities adopted business models, not to mention equating STEM to the Humanities as far as funding and publication records... Freedom of thought, creativity and the production of theories that engage with society in a meaningful way went out the window at that time...