That motivation isn't necessarily inherent in the attendees though. That has been formed by corporations increasingly placing pressure on universities to be their personal training grounds, without any actual investment. Corporations don't want to train anymore. They want universities and other companies to do their training for them.

It's why we're seeing the death of the liberal arts majors. It's sad, because usually the smartest and most creative people I've worked with in the field of engineering and software have been liberal arts majors. But corporations don't want intelligent people. They want people who have been molded to whatever the soup du jour is.

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aleph_minus_one 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> That [motivation] has been formed by corporations increasingly placing pressure on universities to be their personal training grounds, without any actual investment. Corporations don't want to train anymore. They want universities and other companies to do their training for them.

I don't think so.

The problem rather is that corporations very often want some very different knowledge of employees than what universities teach to the students.

If what the universities teach was very important for the job, applicants who have not invested serious effort into getting a deep understanding of the topics of the courses would nearly all fail in the job interviews.

The problem rather is that for many jobs the knowledge that you could have gotten from the university typically does not matter, and thus investing minimal effort into the courses does not get you rejected in a job interview.

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Avicebron 7 hours ago | parent [-]

If only they could communicate with each other and explain their reasoning.

Corporation A "Hi University, here is what we hire highly paid people to do, and what we need to improve as a company."

University B, "Hi Corp A, here is our educational mandate to create well-rounded, highly educated people, we can probably fit your needs into the curriculum in the last couple of semesters, let's work together to make sure you have good employees and we have people who aren't struggling to pay back loans because they have an engineering degree but can't make more than 50K at a dead end job."

	▲	aleph_minus_one 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I basically do agree with you. The only problem that I see with your suggestion is that companies often don't know what they actually, really want from their employees.
	▲	consensus1 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		But in practice the typical situation is that it is perfectly easy to graduate from University B without being well rounded and highly educated, and also you can skate by without actually learning any of the job relevant stuff in the last 2 semesters either. I'm surprised Corporation A doesn't say "FU, we're just going to hire HS grads with high SAT scores and train them ourselves," but for whatever reason they typically don't.