I had such romantic ideas of university when I first started studying — I went because I cared about education and I assumed that the institutions created to serve that virtue would also care about education.

But when I go there I started to see that education, despite the way universities advertised themselves, was mostly an auxiliary concern. And the more prestige the universities I went to got, the louder the claims about education being the core purpose got, and the weaker the reality of those claims seemed to be.

Innocence lost I cynically accepted this reality, but what really irked me was that most students themselves had seemed to adopt the sentiment that the point of university was to get the degree, and that the education part was an annoying and inconvenient side-effect to be avoided at all cost.

That's not to blame students for the way universities have come to be operated, but rather to point out that the parasitic idea of higher education as a business for customers and as a means to an end has even infected students, to the point that the institutions built to honour the value of education have destroyed in students any idea that there's actually any value in it.

Like you, I'm also greatly pained by this topic. Education is sacred. It's perhaps the only tool we have against our own worst tendencies.

I put down some similar thoughts on this topic a while ago, if you care to read: https://medium.com/the-thinkery/whats-the-point-of-university-fdc3852ca65f