Matt Taibbi: Ripping Off Young America: The College-Loan Scandal

[JDPriestly]

18. So, if college students only take courses that "lead to jobs," what happens

to scholarship and culture? What happens to anthropology and 17th Century French Poetry and similar fields that don't produce milk or corn or soap suds?

Did you know that Steve Jobs attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, notorious for its liberal arts emphasis. He is an example of a person who obtained a well rounded education and studied not just how to integrate nuts and bolts with electric wires but how to integrate the personal creativity and aesthetics he had developed in his education to make really attractive products that appeal not just to the desire for products and efficiency but to the human spirit.

Undergrad students should train themselves to work and prepare themselves for the jobs available, but most jobs opening now are in the service industries, and to do them well, you need to understand people (psychology helps), sales (art and music help), communication (languages help), and how to think about the future, which is best learned, oddly enough, from history.

Liberal arts education should be COMBINED with vocational training. Students should not have to pick one or the other and indeed should not be allowed t get a degree without a good grounding in some liberal arts subjects.

Accounting degrees with no knowledge of history -- that's how we got the 2008 economic melt-down.

That course in 17th Century French poetry is where young minds learn history, how to understand different points of view (placing themselves in the mind of a different historical period) and where they develop a sense of their own values and historical and cultural position.

Anyone with a good background in liberal arts can learn technical stuff. I know so many who have done that. But once you are 30, you probably won't have the time to go back and learn about the Middle Ages or the life cycle of the bees. College is for learning more than a trade.

People can go to trade schools after college. In fact, the technical stuff you learn at a junior college may be out-of-date before you graduate.

I think that employers should do far more on-the-job training when it comes to technical skills.

Technology is changing fast. A fundamental liberal arts education is never outmoded or obsolete.