Universities should offer one-year courses

In every respect bar one, those bloody Corbyn-supporting students have a much tougher time of it than I did, what with my full grant and my tuition fees paid. But by God, learning stuff is easy nowadays. The young of today just cannot conceive what a chore it was to eke out enough material for an essay in 1984. To find out anything took hours of mostly wasted effort in a library. If you imagine a world where every page of Wikipedia took half an hour to load, it should give you some idea of what it took to educate yourself back then. That’s why we were all drunk and on drugs: we needed to recover from a tiring week finding out the significant dates of the Delian Confederacy.

So why, pray, do university courses still last three years? Can people not learn any faster now? In his forthcoming book, The Case Against Education, economist Bryan Caplan argues that most education does not really add human capital or skills commensurate with its time or cost.