“Ask random members of the professoriate at my alma mater, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and many will confide that too many people — not too few, as recently suggested by President Barack Obama — are attending college these days. This opinion is impolite and impolitic (perhaps, in the context of the American university, we should say ‘un-PC’). But years of furtive conversation with academics suggest it is commonly held. And one can see why. To the professor with expertise in Austro-Hungarian history, for instance, it is unclear why his survey course on the casus foederis of World War I is a necessary stop in a management-level job training program at Hertz.” (06/09/09)