You are both right. Good universities are vital social institutions. When they work, they preserve and transmit the culture and promote our enlightenment values. They debase their purpose by seeing their role as purely economic, and they embarrass themselves when they make highly dubious claims about their “economic” impact.
Thanks Steven, another really valuable reminder of why we need to support our universities. To paraphrase Robert Kennedy, economics can tell us everything we need to know about the value of the education system, except the value of what it means to learn. Cheers, Andrew
You are both right. Good universities are vital social institutions. When they work, they preserve and transmit the culture and promote our enlightenment values. They debase their purpose by seeing their role as purely economic, and they embarrass themselves when they make highly dubious claims about their “economic” impact.
Thanks Steven, another really valuable reminder of why we need to support our universities. To paraphrase Robert Kennedy, economics can tell us everything we need to know about the value of the education system, except the value of what it means to learn. Cheers, Andrew