I'm still not sure what the purpose of college is even supposed to be.
From what I've read and heard, the purpose of college these days, for most people, is to get a job. Every other article about going to college touts the idea that college graduates earn more than people without BAs. The article about Dartmouth described membership in certain fraternities as a ticket to lucrative Wall Street-type jobs. Ivy league schools are seen by many people as tickets to high-paying jobs. Etc.
I've met a lot of young people who see "gen ed" courses as things to be gotten out of the way. There's no love of learning and often limited curiosity about courses outside one's chosen field. And this is hardly surprising given that we encourage C students and other students with little academic aptitude to head to college.
So all this makes college more of a form of job training and less of a mechanism for creating educated people who are well-rounded and thoughtful.
And then people do studies that measure what graduating students have learned and find out that the answer is "not much:" they can't reason or write any better than they could on day one. And for some reason, everyone is surprised and mystified.
