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> "How do we persuade people not to go to college?"

I think that's the wrong way to look at it. The argument is always practical vs. impractical degrees - but that's not all of it.

The problem is twofold, IMHO:

- Impractical degrees are disproportionately expensive compared to their earning power. You learn a lot of stuff, go deeply into debt, and wind up not being able to pay it off. In short: impractical degrees are overpriced.

- Practical degrees are (in most places) worth the money, but unbelievably loaded in terms of curriculum. Students come up as one-dimensional idiots, who have been impeccably trained in one subject area and nothing else. This creates effective workforces, but creates ineffective citizens, contrary to the humanities (read: most of the impractical degrees).

The two problems are IMHO rather separate, but the second doesn't get nearly enough attention. I cannot begin to count the number of engineers I graduated with who had not even the faintest idea of how politics in our country works - or some of the most basic philosophies the nation is based on, or even the most basic of 20th century history. Few of them appreciate art to any degree, and even fewer practice some form of it themselves.

Our engineering programs are creating idiots - people who can design bridges and write code like no other, but are worthless as people otherwise.

But, are you sure that the "impractical" degree programs are actually doing any better? Perhaps at top private schools one can get a good liberal arts education, but my observation going to a public school was that the science and engineering students generally seemed more well-rounded and more broadly educated compared to the vast hoards coasting along in psych, soc, and polysci; who were mostly interested in the party scene.

I've had many friends in many colleges, some of whom went into the sciences, and others into arts... beyond a limited demographic there were few people who were solely there to party. It's a tired stereotype perpetuated by shitty movies.

My experience has been that arts students tend to be more aware of, well, life in general - politics, the arts, social issues, etc, whereas engineering students were more or less of the "oh, I've heard OF it..."

There are two beneficiaries to post-secondary education: the student, and society (particularly, democracy) at large. The problem here is that the way things are structured, the degree programs that will most benefit a free, democratic society will make you broke, forcing people to choose one that will most benefit themselves only.

We risk creating an entire generation of mindless, uncultured automatons hyper-obsessed with material wealth, wading knee-deep through a pool of educated but broke people.

It wasn't always this way - there was a time when getting an engineering degree also meant a breadth of education in indirectly related subject areas. Where engineers took music, sociology, and fine arts... I've noticed a rapid decline in breadth in engineering programs, though, and IMHO this is a silent problem that has yet to rear its ugly head in the papers.

In my experience, STEM students are interested in solving problems. They are simply uninterested in learning bout problems which they cannot solve. Many of the `life in general' subjects you speak about are problems that cannot be solved...only moved in one way or another.

If they had solutions, if they appealed to an analytical mind then you would have interested STEM students. Maybe there should be a course taught by top politicians, spin doctors and media moguls: `Hacking Public Consciousness'. I almost guarantee that this would attract the students you talk about.

It's a tired stereotype perpetuated by shitty movies.

What, and your statement that scientist and engineers don't care about anything else wasn't?

Look, this is all anecdotal, but the CS/science/math/engineering students I knew in school were generally voracious readers, well informed about current events, politically opinionated in a highly educated way, appreciative of the arts, and involved in extra-curricular activities. They were frequently well-traveled, multi-lingual, and musicians. They were reasonably well represented in student government.

Maybe the schools you went to were different, but this is my experience.

This is the point where people from my neck of the woods (Ontario, and, frankly, most of Canada) suffer severe cognitive dissonance. We have two very different post-secondary tracks, and around these parts a "college" in colloquial parlance is a diploma-granting institute aimed at providing students with marketable skills (technicians, technologists, accountants, nurses who have no aspirations to teach nursing later). The programs may be two or three years, but they are all identifiable by their practical applicability. (The full designation of such institutions is "Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology".) Quite apart from that, we have the Universities which, apart from a few professional programs (medicine/dentistry, law, etc.), come with no promise of applicability whatever. (And even professional degrees are merely preparation for practical situations that will eventually lead to real certification. A BEng degree doesn't make you an engineer, a PEng certification does, and so on.

The point is that, from my perspective, more people should probably be going to college rather than to University. It's not that we don't need thinkers, but that we need more thinkers that can translate thought into action.

EDIT: closed paren to avoid major bug.

Clear goals. Different goals require distinct methods to achieve them. College and University. Perhaps we need more ways to teach and educate people. Ideally one desire thinkers than can translate things into action, but while this is a goal, why don't we try to find the way to give every student the best way to build a good education?

That's more-or-less the point of the two tracks. To put in in a frame that will be familiar to most of the readers here, the study of computability (computer science) is a fascinating theoretical pursuit that has some practical application in the real world, but that theoretical base is often glossed over in the rush to produce "qualified" programmers. Here, at least, the coder stream is in one track (with a sound theoretical base), while the mathematical and electrical engineering streams are in the other. There's nothing preventing a computer scientist from learning to code, nor is there anything keeping a diploma-toting programmer from pursuing mathematics further, it's just far less likely that a kid going into a computer science program is going to expect to emerge from the program as a code monkey or that one entering a programming stream will be wondering when the damned algebra is going to end.

The deep flaw is that too many people go to college for impractical degrees.

Are impractical degrees that bad, in and of themselves?

Provided you can afford the impractical degree or you don't mind the debt to get it, then no, they're not. The problem is that people are investing tens of thousands of dollars into degrees that won't return anything on that investment. I've heard the argument that such an investment is not in money but in making one a more well-rounded person, but I've personally never understood paying so much for knowledge that can be gotten for free with the internet and a library card.

I'm well-rounded. I can also program, do math (it's not just for high school math teachers) and speak German.

Meanwhile, my friend the psych/sociology major is out of work despite intelligence and conversational aptitude, and my friend the anthropology major works at a laundromat for what would be less than minimum wage in most other states.

These are people just as smart as I am, with much better GPAs. We all bought the "college => easy middle class" thing hook, line and sinker; I'm just lucky enough to have chosen a degree that pays.

This is anecdotal, but I know of many people who got jobs from big firms during University's career fair. They were doing things like History, or English language.

The reason why the employers were so keen on them was not that they were going to use the subject itself (e.g. History) but the techniques. A history graduate can read _a_lot_ quickly, summarise it, and hand you a report. Those are great skills that are often required in a job (in some jobs more than others).

So impractical degrees may still be... practical. :) (that said I personally don't think a degree should be judge on how practical it is. But I agree with the poster above that if you do want to focus on things that give you better job prospects in the short run, then there are colleges (in the Canadian/UK sense of shorter, more focused higher eduction courses).

Ah, but which are those, and do we really want to get rid of them all? Math degrees, for example, are not too lucrative employment-wise (except for statistics, which often is in a different department anyway). Do we really want to axe the math department?

Biology is even worse--- its starting salaries are approximately the same as most liberal arts fields. Does biology get to stay because it's science, though, despite having no better a business case than English does?