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There's a difference between what liberal arts degrees are "supposed" to be and what they are. College has been effectively (but incorrectly) marketed as a requ

There's a difference between what liberal arts degrees are "supposed" to be and what they are. College has been effectively (but incorrectly) marketed as a requirement for the everyman to stand any chance of success in the future economy. For better or for worse, Joe Average couldn't give a shit less what an ethnographer thinks of the plight of rice farmers in Cambodia or what a philosopher thinks of the absurdity of the human condition. What he does care about is having a viable income in an economy where unskilled gravy jobs have dried up. Informed citizens and "inheritors of the richness of human culture" generally care about such things before they even reach a university. For everyone else, it's a place that takes their money so they can get a degree and stand a fighting chance in the job market. The overall problem isn't that it's too expensive (it is), it's that people are effectively being forced to go to college in the first place, spending four years earning a degree when they would have been better served by four years of work experience.

jacobolus 9y ago
Joe Average can do a wide variety of vocational training programs, go to a technical/engineering college, join the military, or skip college and go straight into working if he so desires. It’s hardly the colleges’ fault that people show up who don’t really want to be there and “don’t give a shit” about the concept of liberal arts. What kind of future career does your imagined Joe Average aspire to? Semi-skilled manufacturing jobs have mostly dried up because of automation, healthcare costs continue to skyrocket due to the financialization of the medical industry, and wages have been depressed by a range of policy changes that give more and more power and wealth to rentiers and capitalists at the expense of everyone else. I suppose as an alternative all the Joe Averages could get together and vote European-style socialists into office.

jacobolus 9y ago

Joe Average can do a wide variety of vocational training programs, go to a technical/engineering college, join the military, or skip college and go straight into working if he so desires. It’s hardly the colleges’ fault that people show up who don’t really want to be there and “don’t give a shit” about the concept of liberal arts. What kind of future career does your imagined Joe Average aspire to? Semi-skilled manufacturing jobs have mostly dried up because of automation, healthcare costs continue to skyrocket due to the financialization of the medical industry, and wages have been depressed by a range of policy changes that give more and more power and wealth to rentiers and capitalists at the expense of everyone else. I suppose as an alternative all the Joe Averages could get together and vote European-style socialists into office.