Of course there’s a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don’t take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates.

Lowell’s quip plays on the idea of the university as a “storehouse” of learning, then undercuts it with a comic, cynical mechanism: knowledge accumulates not because students are transformed, but because they arrive with some knowledge and depart with surprisingly little added. The joke targets complacency in higher education—institutions that pride themselves on scholarship may fail at the practical work of teaching and intellectual formation. It also hints at a broader critique of credentialism: students pass through the system, but the institution’s reputation for knowledge may be more a matter of faculty and libraries than of what graduates actually carry into the world.