Your leader and article on higher education focus on the cost crisis, changing labor markets, and new technology (“Creative Destruction” and “The Digital Degree,” June 28. 2014). As you say, it has become a middle-class entitlement after World War II, and especially in America and Europe, but it is not value for money any longer. The rising costs of university education are especially painful in the wake of the global financial crisis. At the same time, many white-collar jobs are disappearing, thus obviating the need to prepare for them. To complete the picture, online courses on all and sundry are now available on the Internet, which you dub a disruptive technology. Many universities will thus suffer, and especially those that are not on the very top of ranking lists. Rather than prop up the old institutions of higher learning, you argue, governments should make the new ones work better. All this stands to reason and is reminiscent of your special report on Peter Drucker nearly a decade ago (“Trusting the Teacher in the Gray-Flannel Suit,” November 19, 2005). He, too, envisioned the universities’ eventual demise. However, you neglect to mention that higher education has many functions besides education proper. To begin with, it is a gateway for the best and the brightest among immigrants into America and Europe. Perhaps more important, it is a way to keep the best and the brightest out of unemployment, as well as out of mischief. These eminently social functions of university education are not to be forgotten, and especially not in dire times. To wit, governments would dismantle institutions of higher education at their own peril.