My undergrad degree in literature might not have gotten me a high-paying job out of college, but it helped me live a life that I wanted. I had the privilege o

My undergrad degree in literature might not have gotten me a high-paying job out of college, but it helped me live a life that I wanted. I had the privilege of doing my final two years of college at a school where grades weren't given out for papers in the English department. You'd write a one-page response paper to a Shakespeare play, where you'd have to make a cogent argument/close reading and in response, you'd get 300 words from the professor engaging with your argument. My classes wandered across Irish literature, non-fiction writing seminars, 18th century literature, modern and post-modern theory, and hyper-text literature. I learned to engage with the classics, learned to hear the poetry in James Joyce's initially inscrutable Ulysses, and was forced to confront the problems of loving Pound's words while abhorring his politics. I learned tech later, as I went. I probably would have made more money studying computer science or cognitive science (which was fascinating mix of technology and theory), but I don't regret at all being a liberal arts major. The world is big, fascinating and hard to think through -- and that's not getting any easier. I owe to my liberal arts education the limited skills I have for finding beauty in a true sentence or the mismatched typography of a local business's sign. That education has driven me to understand why I need to live in the world an open heart, to understand things that I naturally want to dismiss and to forge a life built on an ethically-driven approach to politics, literature and art. I've got lots of arguments about how our education system works - starting way before college. But if the new reality is that college is only good for pushing out technicians and a liberal arts education is only for suckers, then we've just added one more depressing symptom pointing to a diagnosis that there's something deeply awry in our nation's economic system and social priorities.