> I have a question—should we determine whether a degree is useful or useless based on how much money you can earn using the degree? My answer is no, for the fo

> I have a question—should we determine whether a degree is useful or useless based on how much money you can earn using the degree? My answer is no, for the following reason: degrees provide some benefits other than benefits that can be directly realized as salary. If you put universities on the hook for student financial outcomes, what you’ve created is a lever for people to dismantle humanities in universities. You can dismantle the arts, literature, sociology, history, and philosophy. I would agree with this if these degrees didn't require a near-catastrophic load of debt. You mention that we should be looking to bring down tuition costs instead, and while that's a good idea, I think it's a little bit of a distraction from the reality that universities are acting in a predatory capacity. They dress it up in flowery academic terms, but the reality is that one credit hour of math is far more valuable than one credit hour of ancient Roman history, yet they cost the same. It's one thing if you want to tell students it's their responsibility to recognize the bad return on investment for liberal arts studies, and universities are just bastions of free thought who can't be expected to put a price tag on the beauty of knowledge or whatever. But students don't have a choice -- they have to take some of these courses for "general education" requirements not directly related to their field of study. So fully half of an engineering student's mandatory costs are credit hours that are a bad return on investment.