Well, you don't have to take dance appreciation or basket-weaving, but there is some value to liberal arts education in addition to vocational training.
Do you really believe that a liberal arts education is worth $62,000 tuition + 2 years of lost wages (roughly another $140,000)? Particularly when, to borrow a phrase from Good Will Hunting, that liberal arts education is available to anyone for about $4.25 in late fees at the public library?
http://cs.nyu.edu/webapps/content/academic/undergrad/majors
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CS5fT5z...
For one thing, NYU trades on their name as well as their education, that's a big chunk of the money you're talking about.
But the more poignant question to me is whether you're getting less out of the liberal arts classes than you are out of the CS classes. I'm not sure that's clear, you can learn engineering anywhere, but 80% of the people I've ever worked with can't write for crap.
If college is just an exercise in signalling, why bother with classes at all?
Why not just replace classes with final exams, give out the paper, host a few networking events and save billions of dollars?
Personally, I value large chunks of the education I got in college, and think the majority of it had some value. I dunno how that value compares to the cost, and I've never seriously considered graduate school of any kind because the (tuition + lost earning) changes a bunch once you have a job.
I was mostly commenting that I thought a lot of the liberal arts education was just as valuable as the technology education, provided that I actually learned the tech so I could get a job. I learned a lot about music, literature and history that I'll have for my whole life, and that I really wouldn't have gotten off my duff to learn on my own.
What do you think made me so anti-college?
Only for some values of "computer science". There is a lot of very tough math involved and having a teacher will save you ages.
There are alway value to an education, in anything. The question is if it is really worth learning about?
Beside, people can learn to appreciate basket-weaving and dance appreciation in their own time. All they need to do is get rid of their TV and get a hobby. People don't need an overly expensive course to do that.
Specifically, I found that the networking (meeting those outside your potential field) and ability to see things from other perspectives was invaluable in my college experience. This breaks down the "siloing" effect that I see a lot of talented CS majors have problems with, an effect that is consequently ruining the business world. Taking off the blinders once in awhile is a good thing, regardless how seemingly useless that Drama 101 class is. It's all what you make of it...