What is the point of a University?

I found a link to this interview in the comments of a story about Edinburgh University's fees (h/t commenter maclean3.)

I think I have little outrage about the change in university fees because this is the second time I've been through it. The Ontario government was allowing universities to massively increase their fees year-on-year, and if I hadn't had the dumb luck to be born to smart parents who planned ahead I would have been massively in debt by the end. At uni I heard similar cracks to the one Lee mentions all the time, all boiling down to 'have fun talking about Kafka when you're stacking in a video store' back when videos and the stores that sold them still existed. The general view was that university was basically a four-year orgy that was supposed to train you for a job. Historically the university system was only ever meant to explicitly train people for are in academia and the clergy. The rest of the student body were mostly aristocrats who weren't going to work a day in their lives anyway. The laments about the decline of vocational training have a certain irony, since now we're trying to force all forms of higher education to be just that.

To academics the point is simply to advance human knowledge. It was academics who sequenced DNA and studied radiation before anyone had thought of a 'real' – that is, economic – use for them. The Theory of Relativity didn't do much for GDP. Most science is only economically valuable with a lot of hindsight, unless you think it was easy to look at quantum mechanics and see credit cards.

These discoveries only help students in indirect ways, so is university just a scam then? What uni should teach is the ability to analyze and articulate complex, abstract concepts. Rather than bestowing particular knowledge, it should teach you how to understand knowledge itself, a skill that people use every day of their lives in our information-rich age. (I have to admit that one look at our culture and politics says this project hasn't been going too well.)

The real question is not whether a degree is a sound economic investment, but what value we place on knowledge itself. While I don't agree with Lee that the attempt to tie university to business was a conscious attempt to marginalise artists and intellectuals – celebrity culture has been far better at accomplishing that – I think the attitude was a natural outgrowth of seeing every single human interaction as economic. (The recent book Honey Money is an example.) If you can't put a price on something, it might as well not exist.