THE LAW SCHOOL BUBBLE.  The dean at Anonymous Community catches up with a high school friend turned law professor.

“Do you ever feel guilty about preparing students for jobs that don’t exist? I do...”

Deeper in the article comes a recognition that when college has to do the high school's job, college doesn't necessarily do the college's job, even among the strivers and keeners who want to hang that shingle.

Even in the law school at which she teaches -- a well-respected one -- my friend reports that many of her students have trouble putting a coherent argument together, especially in writing. I would have expected people with strong undergraduate records to have mastered that skill.

There’s a very real sense in which the loss of legibility in the economy argues for colleges to focus more on the skills developed through the liberal arts. I don’t know what the next hot thing will be, or what the major economic trends of the next decades will be. But I’m willing to bet that people who can handle ambiguity, communicate effectively, and synthesize coherent meaning out of disparate information will be in better shape than those who can’t. In the aggregate, they’ll be better able to adapt to change, to roll with the punches, and to add value that automation couldn’t.

That's been what our institutional research has discovered for a long time, and I've seen numerous attempts to sell the first two years at Northern Illinois in preference to a community college with a good articulation agreement in order to allow students to marinate in that connection-making, critical-thinking milieu longer, rather than get their gen eds out of the way elsewhere only to discover that the upper division classes operate at a level of ambiguity that takes some getting used to.