College, in this view, amounts to little more than higher-level vocational education for middle-class young people, anointing them the yeoman workers of the corporate economy. Low-income students are also expected to serve corporate interests, by pursuing technical educations in vocational schools. Neither poor kids nor kids in the middle should aspire to the broader opportunities that college offers.

Read: The tyranny of the college major

This morally laden political argument for yeomanship presents itself as hardheaded, but it mischaracterizes the realities of the job market that it vaunts. For one, the presumption that a liberal-arts education would prevent students from getting jobs is spurious. Graduates with a broad-based education are in demand. Writing for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the economist David J. Deming argues that employers are currently seeking skills that come from a more exploratory college education, like the one that students receive by studying liberal arts. What’s more, these workers’ “soft skills”—their capacity to communicate and work with others—are in short supply. And Deming points out that the income benefits of STEM jobs are in decline. Economists have observed that since 2000, managerial, professional, and technical occupations have stalled considerably in both the number of jobs and their wage growth. In other words, colleges and universities need to provide the materials for students to cultivate their potential, not just to obtain the kind of targeted, cognitive skills that a narrowly conceived STEM education offers.

The argument for yeomanship also fails to acknowledge that the high cost of college makes it an iffy proposition if the only purpose is to find a well-paying job. The economists John Schmitt and Heather Boushey found that among 24-to-35-year-olds, almost 20 percent of college graduates “actually do no better than their counterparts who left school after high school,” even before taking college debt into account.

The argument for yeomanship also denies the turbulent job market graduates will face. Jobs are much less secure now than they were in the post–World War II decades, and they are likely to become even less so in the future. College students will enter a world in which many jobs are designed to be temporary. Although the corporations of the mid-20th century depended on a stable workforce of long-term employees, capitalism in the U.S. today works by assuming that a “flexible” workforce accustomed to temporary and insecure employment will be at corporations’ disposal.

Because the growth of temporary employment has coincided with massive technological changes, such as the development of the internet, this social reorganization has appeared to be largely a natural consequence of innovation and competition rather than the outcome of human choices. But as the historian Louis Hyman demonstrated in Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary, the shift was an explicit goal of business leaders. Beginning in the 1970s, corporate heads and their consultants began to look for short-term profits, cutting their commitments to their employees. Workers who might stay for years or decades required promotions and benefits and were protected by unions. Disposing of expensive workers became a key to meeting profit targets. In their place, corporations began to rely on short-term employees who would stay for the job at hand and then leave.