There is a prevailing expectation in today’s student body that their university education should make them “work-ready”. That they should graduate with a set of practical skills that enable them to adapt to a work environment.

University teaching is increasingly growing intertwined with the notion of “what employers look for”. This can only mean that universities have conceded that work is in fact the end game, and that the old aphorism that education is a valued end in itself is, however nice, ultimately worthless in our higher education marketplace.

Earlier this year, the Future Leaders Index – a study of the attitudes of Australia’s 18-29 year olds towards careers and employment – reported that eighty-four percent of students surveyed felt that “there needs to be much more workplace training for students”.

In short, students are desirous of skills you can’t learn from a textbook. But universities have been responding to this concern for some time already. Monash University is blatant about it: “We equip you for a successful career”. Within some disciplines, Monash engages representatives from relevant industries to aid in the design of courses.

This integration of university with work is evident also in the rise of professional postgraduate degrees, such as JD programs. Monash’s JD (Juris Doctor, a master of laws which satisfies the academic requirements for admission to legal practice) is for example, a more business-oriented law degree than their undergraduate bachelor of laws, with teaching that emphasises the lawyerly skillset over the study of legal philosophy and theory.

So ingrained is our sense that universities are somehow lacking if they omit these things from their curricula, it has become vaguely blasphemous to assert that they shouldn’t teach students the skills they need at work.

In the current climate, practical skills are apparently what everybody wants.

But despite their best efforts to convince us otherwise, it is misguided to expect universities to impart these skills. The truth is, there has always been a disjunction between study and work.

The bread and butter of any good student is a set of academic skills: research, analysis, argument, clarity of thought, writing and, in some disciplines, good exam technique. Though some of these skills are immediately transferable to the workforce, graduates are less likely to make use of them at work than they are the practical office know-how like good communication and consultation, professionalism, time management and long-term planning across departments.

This disjunction is natural and nothing to be afraid of. Universities, teachers and students should embrace the solipsism of the university experience, and not confine it through attempts to align course content with the job market.

The reality is that work experience – and only that – will teach work skills. Universities needn’t bother. In attempting to do so they only undermine their natural expertise and will inevitably disappoint students who, if the Future Leaders Index is a reliable indication, will graduate from university feeling they haven’t learned these skills anyway.

Given that graduates have the remainder of their working life to pick up workplace skills, compared to only a few years spent at university, why the effort to integrate the two spheres? All answers to this question point to the consolidation of universities as businesses, driving demand from an ever-increasing student base whose concerns about employability they continuously strive to appease.

Bemoaning the state of higher education in The Chronicle earlier this year, Terry Eagleton wrote that universities, and especially humanities departments, are no longer “one of the few arenas in which prevailing ideologies can be submitted to some rigorous scrutiny,” now that they are administered by “hard-faced philistines and purveyors of crass utility”.

Neither is there, he wrote, any value in integration per se. Workplace skills will always be there, to be picked up as needed; but university is, realistically, the only place in which one will have the opportunity to immerse oneself in theories and abstractions – philosophy is the perennial example – while developing academic skills.

The university would be better off sticking to its guns. It should be freed from the confines of a marketplace which has mistaken it for something which it is not – a glorified provider of workplace training. It would continue to teach its timeless skills. The rest is just revenue.

We are now in a situation in which, as Claire Lehmann has written, “too many people are going to university who probably shouldn’t be”. The obvious result is before us is that there aren’t enough jobs for university graduates.

So if university degrees aren’t aligning graduates with the job market as hoped, perhaps students should acquire their academic skillset through studying Kant instead of a compromised curricula of pragmatism for which there is presently no demand.

The worthlessness of integration is evident in this respect. It seems the time-honoured insult leveled at Arts graduates – “What job will you get with that?” – has come back to bite the pragmatists on the arse.