Is college more about signaling than learning?

Interesting - I imagine this might not be very scalable though (imagine a large corporation having to find an impartial, trustworthy reference for every competitive applicant, or to otherwise restrict their hiring pool to friends of friends).

It's about money, same as anything else. And "presteige", which translates to money.

You know what happens with tuition assistance programs? Colleges raise the cost of tuition to capture that money, and leave students under the same burden as before.

Seriously, ask yourself who runs colleges. Who's in charge here? It isn't the professors, I'll tell you that. And it isn't the school administration.

It's usually the board of trustees. In Yales case, it's called "Yale Corporate". The Governor is always a de facto member.

That means the governor is on the board of Yale, AND the University of Connecticut.

The other members are some parts elected by the board, some parts inherited in.. NONE of them is put in by anyone at the schools. Their word is law, and they answer to no one.

I'm sure they're not in the slightest bit self interested or corrupt. Gods, no. It's all about the students best interest!

Originally posted by The Ellimist
Perhaps most notably elaborated on by Bryan Caplan, the signaling model of education posits that the primary value obtained in a degree is the credential it gives you rather than the knowledge or skills it imparts. Essentially, employers hire college graduates because college graduates tend to be more capable than non-graduates, and people go to colleges because they know employers favor college graduates. In the meanwhile, it isn't self-evident how most majors map very clearly onto things you do in the workplace. STEM fields aren't exempt - most engineers don't use lots of differential equations on the job, nor do most software engineers analyze algorithm runtimes. It seems, from this model, that universities represent a bad equilibrium condition.

There are, of course, legitimate counterarguments - the most obvious is that some professional tracks do require deep academic coursework, e.g. academia.

Responding to this directly...

Do you know how professors are trained for the job?

They aren't. They're all literally making it up as they go.

Professors career advancement is based research, how much they publish, and the kind of journals they publish to (Because presteige is everything to a University.)

This is good training to be a researcher, not so much to teach students.

Then there's the Wal-Mart employee version called an Adjunct, who exist solely to free up researchers and save money on underpaid instructors.. The pay is so bad, many have five jobs at five colleges on any number of subjects.

So is it any wonder students learn a lot of useless shite? Teaching college kids is the university equivilent of flipping burgers.