One wonders whether students can be entirely blamed for seeing university courses as concerned with things which are esoteric and obsolete, when so much emphasis is placed on fiction but almost none on cinema, which is certainly the dominant narrative form in our culture. Likewise, there are a large number of courses on poetry, in many different languages, but almost none on song, which has a much more powerful impact on contemporary society. There are not very many companies who really need employees who can show a lot of initiative and creativity. When those qualities are in fact important, most employers fairly quickly learn that a college background is not a very useful criterion for hiring. Teaching Students How to Become Professors.
Faculty look at the goal of education differently.
As faculty, most of our efforts are directed at teaching students how to be like ourselves. We faculty, after all, are good people. We have good values. Especially in upper level courses, we try and teach students how to be professors. One sees this very much in the selection of courses offered at major universities.