OBSERVATION OF THE DAY. Yale is not a trade school.

Karl Marx got a few things wrong, but he was right that economics drive history. So too, our most important public policy debates revolve around questions of how to distribute resources and intervene in markets — questions of which economics is the ultimate arbiter. So our Socratic duty to know our world and our humanitarian duty to improve it both require us to understand economics. But economics is so popular, we suspect, at least in part because many people think it will help them in a future career.

Leave aside for the moment the conceit embedded in that "humanitarian duty to improve it." (Perhaps a few minutes with Adam Smith will provide a corrective, or at least a dash of humility.) Yale is not the only not-a-trade-school that has become a trade school, according to the columnist.

Over the summer I met a banker and recent Notre Dame graduate at (I confess) a Harvard Club event. He told me he loved modern theology and Renaissance literature. But he had also always wanted to be a Manhattan financial elite. If he majored in literature or theology at Notre Dame, interviewers would have asked him, “Why not finance?” So he majored in finance — which has now become one of the largest majors at a university once devoted to the contemplative life. He now claims that nothing he learned from his major has benefited him in his job. Many like him forwent a liberal arts education for the sake of something that only benefited them for three interviews. Ideally, he could have used his four years at Notre Dame to enrich his appreciation of theology and literature, while still getting an elite job afterwards.

I'm not sure what sort of equilibrium a take-the-right-courses-despite-them-providing-no-job-skills is. Presumably high grades in a proper theology and literature sequence would also be a signal of high ability. If attendance at elite colleges provides neither immediately useful human capital nor an obvious signal, what are those colleges providing? (Via Minding the Campus.)