CircuitGuy quoted iroseland: "Most folks were simply expected to take their first assembly class twice." I took several classes twice. Calculus I, Fortran, Basic, Physics I (three times: for non-science majors, for science majors, honors physics; I really know my mechanics.) Later, I had Intro to Criminology twice at two different schools about a semester apart -the U would not accept the credits of the CC for the major; same with Juvenile Justice.

Republicans in particular make a big deal of the fact that it takes five or six years, not four, to graduate. I never saw it as a race to a finish line, but part of a lifelong process. Many kids who drop out of high school finish some other equivalent program later. We do not all have to do the same thing the same way at the same time.

CircuitGuy said: "There is more value in art, called "industrial design" in my world, than in the past." Back in 1984, that came to me in two movies, _Brainstorm_ and something else set in the year 2000 totally unmemorable except for this. When the boardroom argument came down, the technical guy said that either he gets his way or "my designers walk." I was teaching my first class in Computer Aided Design and I took that to my mentor. He said that it was the future.

CircuitGuy said: "... doing arithmetic, having good spelling, and speaking multiple languages are less important now than in the past b/c computers can assist more." But they cannot give you talent. Writing garbage that the MS-Word grammar and spelling checker will accept is a cliche that you can find on the Internet. Another writer and I did it by hand in 1990 when our boss wanted us to deliver proof that we were using it.

After two terms of teaching computer aided design at a community college, the department chair caught up with me and made me enroll in mechanical drawing. I actually had the class once before at another school but it was not on my transcripts. It worked out well enough. I took two terms. After a hard day sitting at a computer, it was nice to stand and draw in the evening.

Last year, one of the buildings I guarded had a couple of design firms in it and I got to know a couple of artists. One of them said that he was struck by kids who came to college wanting to learn computer animation, but who had never drawn anything with pencils or crayons.

Thanks for the narrative, iroseland. It is true contrary to Penn & Teller that engineers and STEM _tend_ to be employable specifically because of their mandatory college classes. For them, college is an apprenticeship. That said, I did hear an article on NPR about the hard lives of bio-med post docs who with PhDs in life science are stuck at $40K per year as lab aides - when they can find work.

Also, you miss the mark entirely on "liberal education." It is not just the humanities. Humanities are just half, less than half, actually, of a liberal education that must by definition include mathematics and science.

As I said in the original post: "In the medieval university, the two broad studies were the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy). Today, these are classes in communications, literature, film, art and art history, foreign languages, computer literacy, algebra, statistics, calculus, physics, biology... the entire university catalog." A liberal education must include science and mathematics or it is just 3/7 of the curriculum, i.e., the humanities.

When I enrolled at the College of Charleston, in 1967, I was assigned Mark van Doren’s _Liberal Education_. Back then, C of C was a small four-year school with 450 enrolled. One of our professors for European history was György Heltai who worked in the government of Hungary after WWII and was arrested, imprisoned and tortured in a Stalinist purge. The professor of classics, Alexander Lenard, published his Latin translation of Winnie-the-Pooh. My professor for chemistry, Carl Lykes, spent his summers at the Savannah River Nuclear Power Plant. It was just a little old college, nothing special, but a place where world class intellectuals shared their working lives with any interested student.

"Most folks were simply expected to take their first assembly class twice."
I recall several large classes where they wrote the letter grades, A-E at UF, and a percentage of the class that would receive each grade. They followed through. As the drop date approached, people will the failing grades would drop, causing people to slide down a grade. So if you had a C before the drop date, you'd likely have a D after it.

"Every time I find myself enjoying a glass of very expensive scotch I remember that it was paid for by missing out on a lot of cheap beer. "
I drank a little Nattie Light in college. Now it's Oban and Talisker.

ok..

So, mostly when people talk about college grads not finding work they are talking about one subset of college grads..
Liberal Arts Majors.. This always reminds me of a video that was shown in English class when I was Junior in high school ( 1986 ) that tried really hard to make a case for the importance of people getting degrees in the Humanities.. If we could go back in time and have a look over my shoulder at the scribblings in my notebook it was loaded with code to do vector analysis involving lobbing a projectile at a very long distance and filling in as many of the annoying little variables as possible.. On the weekends we were working on a home brew rail gun and well, math.. A few years later I was on the engineering side of campus at the University. While I had been accepted to some schools that I could in no way afford, and was offered a free ride at a school that could in no way keep up with me. I was pretty comfortable at UW-Milwaukee. The CS program there was built to make folks who could handle a great deal more than the billing systems at an insurance company. We spent a lot of time on operating system design, compression and encryption. So, real CS problems.. Of course it was crazy hard most of the time. Most folks were simply expected to take their first assembly class twice. The result was that most folks were trading nights of collegiate drunken debauchery for a a load of mid career drunken debauchery. Every time I find myself enjoying a glass of very expensive scotch I remember that it was paid for by missing out on a lot of cheap beer. I am continuously glad that I chose to have fun later and really focused on what I was there for.. Thing is, over on the other side of campus that did not seem to be how people thought. They drank the cheap beer, and now would really like it if I were to pay for their scotch along with mine. The thing is, there is a place for the Liberal arts classes. They are a nice hobby, and do help to provide some nice blow off classes when you need a semester where you remain full time but take a break from the hard stuff where facts are facts and the wrong answer will always be wrong. Every once in a while it can be handy to take a class where somehow an opinion can be right or wrong depending on how well you suck up to the teacher. They are easy to predict and doing well in that world is made easy by the fact that facts matter less. So, yes I did things like take a semester of comparative lit where I got to spend a semester reading 19th century Russian classics.. I figure it was worth it because have other things to talk about than managing race conditions, or clean data structures. UW-Milwaukee also had a pretty big fine arts department.. I knew folks over there.. Particularly a bunch of film school folks, they never seemed to have any trouble getting work in their industry after graduating.. Heck, I know of a few who left early.. This leaves he Liberal Arts folks, who arrive at the University without much in the way of marketable skills, and leave the University in pretty much the same state. At least the fine arts folks know they are taking a risk..

Many things you'd traditionally think of as useful for jobs such as doing arithmetic, having good spelling, and speaking multiple languages are less important now than in the past b/c computers can assist more. There is more value in art, called "industrial design" in my world, than in the past.

I'm far from opposed to liberal arts education. I just think college shouldn't have a monopoly on it. High school could do some of this. Classes any young-adult or adult level can be partially automated, to each people more cost efficiently. College has gotten out of hand in its cost and claims of being the only way to learn; it's ripe for disruption.

In short, education is it’s own reward. ;)

"Perhaps the bottom line of whether and to what extent arts (and humanities) “pay off” by whatever measure can be derived from the biography of Steve Ditko on Wikipedia"

"Stephen J. "Steve" Ditko (born November 2, 1927) is an American comic book artist and writer best known as the artist and co-creator, with Stan Lee, of the Marvel Comics heroes Spider-Man and Doctor Strange.

"Following his discharge [from the US Army], Ditko learned that his idol, Batman artist Jerry Robinson, was teaching at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (later the School of Visual Arts) in New York City. Moving there in 1950, he enrolled in the art school under the G.I. Bill.

"The ultimate question may be what science fiction author L. Neil Smith calls “Asimov’s Fallacy.” In his Foundation trilogy, Isaac Asimov posited a science of psycho-history whereby the huge numbers of humans in the Galaxy allowed statistical predictions of future events. The fallacy is that all such numbers depend on the actions of individuals with free will. It may well be true that 47% of fine arts majors earn 61% less than 79% of business majors, but that says nothing about the success of any single artist … or of those who do not complete their college education at all, such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, though granted that the founder of Cypress Semiconductor, T. J. Rodgers earned his doctorate in electrical engineering by inventing MOSFET chips." (from "The Pretense of Sociology" on NecessaryFacts)

Moreover, Prof. Lena provides survey numbers to indicate that some to many fine arts majors – painting, sculpture, theater, dance – do at least nearly as well as STEM majors, and better than humanities majors at finding work in their fields after graduation. The close ties between universities and museums, for instance, provides one path.To me, however, the most telling part of Jenn Lena’s work is reflected in the individual comments that show the lack of correlation between how the person feels about their fine arts education and where they are working today. Whether a lawyer benefited from drama class depends on the lawyer, not the class. (from "The Pretense of Sociology" on NecessaryFacts)