Is university a waste of time and money?

The Deluge of Mediocrity: Education’s Mission Submerged

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Beneath the placid surface of institutions lies a truth too often ignored: when purpose drifts, rot festers. Organisations—be they corporations blind to their customers, hockey teams mistaking battle for sport, or churches worshipping their pews—capsize when they cease to ask, “Why do I exist?”

The query is a lifebuoy; without it, they sink into irrelevance. Yet self-awareness is rare, and those who should steer us back—managers, friends, spouses—often remain silent, complicit in the drift.

Post-secondary education is the Titanic of this aimless flotilla, a grand vessel taking on water while the band plays on. Universities, once lighthouses of learning, now wallow in the shallows of credentialism, their mission drowned in a flood of inflated grades and hollow rituals.

What other industry boasts clients who pay for a service never delivered, then toast their fleecing? Only academia, where complacency is bought with A’s, and introspection is as welcome as a squall.

The crime is not mere mismanagement but a betrayal of first principles. Academic institutions exist to ignite minds, not mint diplomas. Yet they’ve traded this noble charge for the tawdry robes of an uncommitted priest, chanting empty syllabi while the congregation dozes.

Classes and credentials are tools, not ends—oars to navigate the seas of knowledge, not anchors to moor ambition. To mistake the map for the voyage is to maroon both teacher and student on barren shores.

Students, too, are complicit, wading through this academic swamp with eyes fixed on extrinsic baubles: grades, GPAs, degrees. As Daniel Pink has shown, such rewards spur only the dullest tasks, not the deep currents of thought. True learning flows from intrinsic desire, a spark that cannot be conjured by PowerPoint or imposed by a rubric.

I tell my business students: if all your courses bore you, you need to set out and find a new harbour.

Yet Canada’s dogma—that all must sail to university while trades are scorned—fills classrooms with listless mariners, then feigns shock when graduates can’t navigate a spreadsheet or a wrench.

But even the keenest student may not flourish in barren soil. A professor who drones, slides flickering like a lighthouse gone dim, is no farmer of minds but a slumlord of ideas, letting weeds choke the field.