Perhaps the purpose of higher education, at least initially, shouldn’t be to pass on a fixed set of job skills, but to form the intellect.

T here was a time when a degree from Harvard Business School (HBS), my alma mater, was a golden ticket to immediate and lucrative employment. No longer.

A Wall Street Journal article has set off alarms throughout corporate America — where I worked as an investment banker for 40 years — and academia, where I now ply my second career as a college CFO. The story reveals that nearly a quarter of last year’s HBS graduates were still looking for a job three months after their graduation.

That number marks a 20 percent increase from the prior year, raising serious questions about the diminishing value of a Harvard MBA. But the problem is hardly limited to Harvard. The Journal’s Lindsay Ellis reports similar findings at a half-dozen of the country’s top MBA programs.

Tuition at HBS currently runs at $76,410 annually. Yet when it comes to landing a quality job, this pricey degree seems to have lost much of its cachet. “Going to Harvard is not going to be a differentiator,” one HBS official acknowledged to the Journal. “You have to have the skills.”

That’s an incredible admission, considering that the very purpose of business schools is to transmit “the skills” that lead to top jobs.

If Harvard Business School can’t teach those skills, then who can? And what about the hundreds of undergraduate programs across the country that crank out hundreds of thousands of bachelor’s degrees in business and related fields each year: Is it realistic to expect them to do any better than HBS?

In our volatile economy — where we can’t even predict which jobs humans will still be working in six months, let alone in ten or 25 years — building a college education around the momentary needs of an ever-shifting marketplace is a fool’s errand. Many professions that a college can train students for today will be obsolete tomorrow, and the typical business professor can no better predict the job of tomorrow than any of the rest of us can.

Nonetheless, the default approach at most American colleges nowadays is to offer increasingly specialized programs in narrow, siloed majors, with minimal — and often no — broader academic requirements. According to a survey from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, less than 2 percent of four-year undergraduate institutions require students to take courses in seven major disciplines, and less than 30 percent require any study of literature, foreign language, or even basic economics.

It seems we’re going about this the wrong way. Perhaps the purpose of higher education, at least initially, shouldn’t be to pass on a fixed set of job skills, but to form the intellect, so that students are equipped to learn the skills for any job they seek.

Such an education would cover a wide range of disciplines, fostering versatility. It would be integrated, so that students could understand how the disciplines connect and build upon one another. And it wouldn’t rely on textbooks, which simplify complex ideas for their readers. Rather, it would feature primary texts — great, challenging, and timeless ones — thereby promoting critical thinking and comprehension, while engaging students in the foundational ideas that underpin every human enterprise.

For 250 years, such learning, historically known as “liberal education,” was the norm at American colleges and universities, especially elite ones. But over the last century or so, the classical curriculum became unfashionable, and the specialized degree overtook it. Today, only a handful of schools still offer a truly liberal education, optimal for the innovation economy. (Full disclosure: Thomas Aquinas College, where I work, is one of them.)

I had the good fortune to go to Harvard Business School back in the golden-ticket days, graduating in 1978, when that ticket opened doors up and down Wall Street. My first job after graduating was in New York at E.F. Hutton, followed by a string of similar roles at firms such as Drexel and Prudential, where the first thing the bosses told us was: Forget everything you learned in business school.

Even then, I had to acknowledge that my HBS education, like the Georgetown bachelor’s degree in business that preceded it, was far more valuable for the prestige it conveyed than for the knowledge it conferred, however worthwhile. Time and again, I saw that liberally educated peers were no less, and sometimes more, prepared than us B-school types.

With the prestige of many specialized degrees — and the fleeting knowledge they impart — rapidly declining in value, students who are serious about succeeding would be wise to seek out a very different sort of education.