Though I'm an engineer, I find this attitude toward a traditional classical education to be short-sighted. The fact that a degree in English or Art History doesn't train one directly for one's career doesn't mean it's useless. The problem arises when people get such a degree thinking that it's directly useful in securing employment. To the extent there are guidance counselors and others who give this misguided impression, that needs to change.
Classical education used to be valued for the broad interests it helped its students develop, and just for the plain thrill of learning. It seems these qualities aren't much appreciated nowadays.
For starters, traditional classical education would be a seminary.
There is nothing traditional or classical about this push for everyone to get a meaningless degree. The subsidizing of post-secondary education w/no regard to the content of that education is not classical in any sense and quite new. Nor has it served any functional purpose except to inflate the job market and lead employers to adding needless degree requirements. Today, you pretty much have to have a 4yr degree to enter the job market outside of a very few specific fields (ie: mechanics, nurses) which have escaped the "accreditation" nonsense.
The Baby Boomer generation has created this pyramid scheme, with themselves as the beneficiaries at the top, by conning subsequent generations into obtaining these degrees. They've effectively told my generation that, in order to even enter the private job market and start paying taxes, we must first go $20,000 in debt to the government. And it's not like these kids are gaining any valuable experience at these institutions either. I mean, whose scamming who here?
The Universities know they're milking us and the government as well. They demand in-state subsidies, then raise tuition by whatever amount they've gained. They do their damndest to interrupt education and arrange prerequisites in an attempt to make people stay as long as possible. Every year you stay there, that's free money to them.
You two have both seemed to bag on "trade schools", but what is fundamentally better about a University education than a Trade School? If somebody were able to get a Physics Degree in ~18 months studying 9-5 every day 52 weeks a year, how would they be less prepared than the guy who spent 4 years obtaining that degree? And don't tell me it's because of the 100-level liberal arts bunk, because those classes are a joke. They're nothing more than a means of spreading the wealth around all the departments in a University.
My favorite was a Asian History class I took for a "cultural perspective" requirement. Mind, thanks to the military, I've lived on 3 different continents in 4 different countries for at least 6 months or more. I'm married to a foreign national, and I learned to speak a foreign language in-country through immersion. So this Lecturer, who it turns out had never left the Continental US, was supposed to be providing us all with a wider view of culture. As it turned out, reading Cambridge History of Japan while I was in the dirt proved to give me more knowledge than the Doctorate-holding Lecturer knew about the subject material. It's a joke.
Another was a "Ethics and Morals" Philosophy class, wherein one section of our textbook reading the author went on a long diatribe about Isaac Newton being a symbol of Science vs. Religion (the author had a very dim view of xianity). Absolute bollocks. Isaac Newton wrote more on the Bible than he did on Science, and he studied at Cambridge - a seminary. And you can be assured in the 17th century that Cambridge was a seminary first and foremost, unlike today. When I pointed this out in the essay, the Professor returned it to me and demanded I rewrite it. I instead took it to the Dean. I didn't rewrite it and walked with an 'A' in the class.
The Ivory Tower doesn't teach anyone anything valuable.
As for business degrees... I'm pretty sure any aspiring entrepreneur would learn a great deal more about economics through experience than via made-up Ivory Tower relationships super-imposed over math.
Calculus was a 'weeder course' at the university I went to that is required to enter certain colleges. At the time those students wanting to enter the business college like me had to take classes with those students wanting to be mechanical engineers, chemists and physicists. Further, these classes were graded on a curve where a certain percentage of the class was going to fail which led to a very competitive atmosphere. After it became evident that most of the business student wannabes were getting their asses kicked by the more serious students, the rumbling began. The discussion one day in class was eye-opening.
A bold business student better suited for sales than calculating complained that the trouble was that all of the problems in the book we were asked to do as homework and also on the tests pertained to the physical sciences and not economics or business. Therefore, he said, we were at a disadvantage when interpreting a problem in order to solve it. The teacher pointed out that the subject of the problems did not affect the correct formulation and calculation of answers. Basically two plus two is always four whether or not it's apples or oranges. As one of the few business students that passed the course that semester, I agreed that this made sense and kept my mouth shut.
The mutineers pressed on, "But there are practice problems in the book that are based on economics problems like what we'll be doing and you never assign them." The teacher smiled and several A-students laughed.
One said, 'Yea well the rest of us don't want to waste our time jerking off.' This raised the emotional level of the conversation and the hair went up on the backs of several business students.
"What's that supposed to mean?" the ringleader responded indignantly.
"It means that economics is mathematical masturbation. If you're going to make up the inputs and pull the relationships out of your ass, then you might as well just make up the answers."
"What?"
"We can measure the temperature that water will boil and the speed of objects falling, because we can reproduce these experiments proving quantifiable results."
"So?"
"In physics, we can test our facts. Economics is bullshit in, bullshit out. It's a waste of time."
http://www.strike-the-root.com/92/davis_m/davis1.html
(Note I'm not endorsing the rest of that rant in favor of 1 flavor of nonsensical "economics" ... I merely find the anecdote to be prescient.)
