You're conflating two different types of work, which each have a different purpose:

- making a change to your own mind and/or body (studying math, lifting weights)

- making a change to the world (optimizing ad placement, operating a forklift truck)

Do you think gyms should allow people to lift heavy weights with forklift trucks, so that they can work like they do in the real world?

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onion2k an hour ago | parent [-]

That's an amusing analogy, but it's conflating university as a purely academic pursuit (learn these things in order to know the things) with university as vocational training (learn these things so you can get a job.) As people have to pay for their degree through loans now, people see it as a means to get the career they want. It's not learning any more. It's training.

So, to continue the analogy, a degree is the equivalent of a forklift truck license, and people do want to drive their forklift truck to the gym. Because they're paying to be able to do that.

	▲	underdeserver 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Undergraduate degrees are not vocational in any of the leading universities in any field. They are sometimes a prerequisite to vocational training, but aren't one in and of themselves. There's a pretty good reason for that - the base assumption is that training in fundamentals, methods and ways of thinking is something you won't get anywhere else.