From J.M. Anderson's Three Cheers for Useless Education:
Let’s face it, most students want jobs or to get into good professional and graduate schools and therefore care little about useless general education courses and the formative process of education; Corporate America wants skilled workers, not philosophical or reflective employees (who might then question some of its practices); therefore, the marketplace reinforces the economic value of higher education and dictates the nature of the curriculum and the priority of the courses that are taught. To keep up with current trends, many colleges and universities market their product as “a major investment,” as the president of a selective four-year liberal arts college, stated, and then added: “And with returns that will last a lifetime, it’s one of the best investments anyone could make.” But students aren’t buying this highfalutin talk. They are buying degrees so that they can make money because Mass Culture U.—television, music, movies, advertising, celebrities—tells them that that means success. Like religion, the life of the mind can wait until, as one student told me, after she gets a job, gets married, has children, and settles down. Then she’ll have time to think about “art and books and all that stuff.”
I agree about the value of a "useless education." I also agree with his distinction between "liberal arts" and "job training." I think Prof. Anderson is likely an inspiring prof.
However, I think liberal arts education has become insanely and unnecessarily expensive, so that people feel forced to regard it as a financial investment. Ask me whether I think higher ed is a credentialling racket, or expensive babysitting for superannuated adolescents.
Also, I do not think "the life of the mind" is for everybody. Seems to me that we have many people feeling obligated to "attend college," whatever that means, when they would feel more motivated and engaged in "training" to do something practical instead.
