As am I. A liberal arts education makes you better able to understand and explain the world around you. The notion that every moment of college must be teaching you a skill that you will directly apply in your future career is positively stifling.
Strawman. Very few people are saying that, not enough to worry about. The claim is not that 100% of college should be about teaching useful skills, the claim is that if you're going to be put into tens of thousands of dollars of debt that can not be removed by bankruptcy it should probably be the case that more than zero percent of your college time should be spent on a directly-salable skill.
Many people are really misunderstanding the argument here. It is not that liberal arts are bad. It is that it is basically large-scale fraud to sell a college degree as best way to a well-paying job and worth the massive undischargable-debt without explaining that the promise really only applies to practical degrees.
You are free to complain about how the market only values degrees that produce marketable skills (and I've deliberately phrased it a bit tautologically to make it obvious that it's not really a very compelling complaint), but I still say that if you want people to pursue impractical degrees you need to be doing it by telling them the truth about what they are doing. I will not deny anybody their right to go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt chasing their dream, I just want them to do it with eyes wide open.
There was an article in the NY Times a couple of weeks back describing all these students are getting into tons of debt, graduating private colleges, and expecting to leave college and get some high paying salary because they went to Harvard or Columbia. The article at followed one girl in particular, showing examples from her life how tragic the situation was for these college grads. It wasn't until the end of the article that her major was mentioned: Womans Studies.
A liberal arts education can only be supported by an economy that that is strong enough to allow it. Thats just not the case anymore. At least not for people to spend 4 years on; not to mention the negative cash flow. Its not that Liberal Arts is inherently bad, it is just unsustainable as it exists right now.
>As am I. A liberal arts education makes you better able to understand and explain the world around you. The notion that every moment of college must be teaching you a skill that you will directly apply in your future career is positively stifling.
A computer science education is not merely vocational training, as you imply. But theoretical CS is still a hell of a lot more meaningful than postmodern literary theory.
Maybe, maybe not, but for the time and cost investment, it's not a good proposition if you aren't going to make money off of it. And, at any rate, if you're not going to use the qualification bestowed, why not simply take part time classes and take on the subjects that interest you most as oppossed to taking the curriculum mandated for a degree?
