A freshman newly arrived on campus and inundated with the many college-orientation sessions that mark his first experience in a new situation might wonder, why all the fuss?

Universities ostensibly provide students with rigorous training to prepare them for their chosen field. There’s more to it than that, however, because if it were only that, the students could skip the addlepated rigmarole that has become an accepted part of what’s blithely called “the college experience” (which amounts to hazing or coddling, depending upon one’s fealty to the campus’s hair-trigger socialist bent) and go directly to a private provider of vocational training.