Gregory Petsko’s letter to George M. Philip, President of the State University of New York At Albany is a wonderfully biting critique on much of what is wrong with today’s attitudes toward higher education and universities in the USA. See here, for example.
If college is neither a luxury good nor an investment, what is it?
How about this? A university is a unique human institution participating in the cooperative discovery and preservation of knowledge, not for exploitation for financial gain, but for ameliorating the human condition.
Why do so many people think that university is just a place of teaching?
Folk the Algorithms 