I have to admit my feelings are pretty favorable to the idea even if I'm not a fan of the rhetoric. The flip side is that what this kid, and the Zuckerberg-aspiring minions that are forming this new trend, mistakes for his own capacity to think critically is more likely a combination of analytical skill and organization. He almost certainly does not have the capacity to see his own trend as part of larger intellectual movements such as how, for example, he may be a slave to particular projections of the self with roots in the Enlightenment and market economics (which is to say that he probably would not be aware that there might be another view of the self that would make his entire argument a virtual string of non-sequiturs). That said, it's not clear that he needs such an understanding in order to provide food for himself and any future family.
That's still to say that college is not for everyone, but also that college is still for some. I don't think "higher education is broken." Instead, I'll offer this convoluted little metaphor for the situation: It's as though we became enamored with the joinery inherent in carpentry and have since tried to reduce all carpentry to using a hammer to tighten a bolt. That is, we've taken the university (a whilom proxy for a particular vocation) and turned it into a tool for effecting "critical thinking" in order to accomplish some sort of vague societal progress (scholastic-monastic vocation = carpentry, modern university = tool/hammer, tightening bolt = critical thinking). Instead, the university's greatest "product" (critical thinking) seems only to be a by-product in the first place. That's to say, we've taken something that is not a tool, made it a tool, and then used it for ends to which it is ill-suited.
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