I suspect this is a hold-over from when college was seen as the place to learn how to learn, as opposed to learning a specific skill set. There’s a quote from the poet Phaedrus I think sums up the old (and largely obsolete) ethic of higher ed, A learned man always has wealth within himself. The quote remains true, but it no longer applies to higher ed where even well-connected idiots can graduate from Ivys. Also, I think there was a long, slow and massive panic in the late 20th Cen over tradecraft being outmoded by automation.
The thing is that I know enough about the practical applications of automotive maintenance that I know that won’t really happen. I like bicycles, motorcycles, and (increasingly) old cars because I can repair most of what fails on them. But modern autos are a different animal altogether and will only get more so as companies like Tesla and Google drive the tech to new levels of sophistication. The upshot is that there’s no real reason to think that skilled tradecrafts are going anywhere. Even the idea that it’s a different sort of knowledge is overly simplistic. There’s a false divide in physics (my field) between theorists and experimentalists, an anachronism that’s slowly but surely being abandoned. The reality is a multidimensional continuum between knowledge workers and applied sciences.
If our vaunted university system is to remain relevant into the 21st Century, it must abandon the one-size-fits-all educational model and adapt to the new reality that students and society don’t benefit from everyone aspiring to that four-year rubber stamp that more often than not has little on-the-job relevance. The problem is that, even though many an academic and administrator will enthusiastically nod along when you tell them that, the whole system is built on bilking maximum profits from middle-class Americans pushing their children to climb the class ladder, or lower-middle-class kids incurring debt they’ll spend a third of their life or more getting out from under, so they change nothing because change is not in the best interest of their own job security.
sigh
Sorry, I know I’m getting on my soapbox again. The intransigence of institutional stupidity just frustrates the hell out of me.
