Nick HutchisonFounder and CEO, BookThinkers

Why was college created back in the day?🤔

21 Jun 2023 · 1 min

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In this short monologue, the speaker reflects on a passage from the book The Gap and the Gain that explains the original purpose of early colleges: to transform child laborers into a more educated, yet still primarily labor‑focused, workforce. The speaker notes that these institutions were never intended to cultivate independent thinkers or leaders, but rather to produce more skilled laborers. He then juxtaposes this historical intent with today’s massive tuition expenses, questioning the value of traditional college education when numerous alternatives—online courses, professional certifications, and trade schools—now exist to provide comparable or superior skill acquisition at far lower cost.

Chapters

I'll share an interesting perspective. I'm reading the book right now, The Gap and the Gain, and in the chapter I was in, it was talking about how they created college like back, you know, in the early days because we had all these kids doing child labor. And so they created schools so that they could create more educated workforce, right? But they were still meant to be laborers, just more advanced laborers, not to be freedom thinkers, not to be leaders, right? Just to be laborers, just with a larger skill set. And so I never actually knew that until today, but I thought, oh wow, how interesting. And yet we still have this program that has this huge expense associated with it. And there's so many things out there now, like online courses and certifications and trade schools. Like, there's so many different ways to do it.