Value of a college education

About a hundred years ago, a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford, John Alexander Smith, got to the nub of the matter.  "Gentlemen," he said to the incoming class (the students were all men in those days), "Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life-- save only this-- that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education."  Americans tend to prefer a two-syllable synonym, bullshit, for the one-syllable Anglicism rot-- and so we might say that the most important thing one can acquire in college is a well-functioning bullshit meter.

Andrew Delbanco
College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be
2012

page 29