How do we convince fewer people to teach at the college/university level?

[Adrahil]

83. Bah... you miss the point.

Like I said... I'm an engineer, and I appreciate practical, professional degrees.

But the point of getting an English Lit degree isn't just to learn about English Lit. It's about learning to be a critical thinker. Universities are not just about learning a job-specific skill, like being an engineer, but about learning how to THINK. Specifically, how to think critically. And yeah, English Lit, properly taught, is EXCELLENT for that.

I can't tell you how many times I've had to struggle in order to get engineers working for me to right something coherent enough to even be worth sending to the tech writers. In my experience, many engineers are so disdainful of the liberal arts, that they really do have trouble expressing themselves unambiguously, or understanding basic things like rhetorical logical fallacies. Many of them could stand a few more lit and philosophy classes.

English Lit forms a great foundation for a professional degree (like law school, or an MBA). The same can be said for many undergraduate liberal arts degrees.

The COO of my company was an English major.

I agree that students to actually think about what they want to do upon graduation. No one is going to hire someone with a BA to deconstruct a 19th century novel. But those skills, and theoretical frameworks can be applied in many jobs. So yeah, English majors (and other liberal arts graduates) have to do some career planning which is less straight forward than, say, an engineer. But even some hard science majors need to be thinking about their plans upon graduation. Many of those fields require an advanced degree for realistic employment opportunities.