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Comment by f1yght | Hacker News Reader

It's also unfortunate that majors that teach people how to write and think critically are panned. Those are very useful skills and give people a better ability in normal life. I understand college is so expensive that people feel a need for it to prepare you for a job, but I still hold onto the ideal that college should be a place that allows people to grow as a person and learn to communicate and think.

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This is the thing I find really puzzling. Being able to read between the lines of virtually any kind of communication (but especially business communications) is kind of a superpower. I can only come up with cynical reasons why it’s deprecated.

Such as the comment below you

a key point is that these skills - soft skills if you will - can be learned on the job, even with minimal background knowledge. It is much harder to learn programming or electrical engineering on the job if you lack the educational base.

Communication is a critical skill today as are information skills. Truly sad that they are often derided as being worth less than technical skills.

This is fair, and this may be a question of branding.

Let's call it not English major, a mostly literary scholar, but a master of natural language communication and epistemology. Definitely it's a set of skills useful in a wide variety of positions.

It takes an exceptionally affluent society to let everyone pursue their interest as their full-time occupation. I expect the few of exceptional ability to make a living off literary research pursuits, via grants and book sales, with others who love it doing it as a hobby, or after retirement. This is roughly how it worked for many centuries in the past, and the results are impressive.

It's now assumed that anyone who doesn't treat it as a vocational school is a fool. That's unfortunate, but it's how the whole institution has changed - it's too costly to NOT focus on something that has an immediate and obvious ROI.

Agree but with major caveat that students in those majors may be actually improving those skills less than you may be assuming. It’s generally true of most colleges and students that they seem to learn strikingly little as measured by pre/post tests.

It's the hidden implication that only financially unviable jobs can teach people to communicate and think deeply.

I'm sure your average psychiatrist graduate can communicate and think logically, despite having a high paying job. Or airline pilot, or naval officer, or air traffic controller, or scientist, or businessman etc.

American colleges are ideologically captured. If you think the humanities department is teaching critical thinking, you are sorely mistaken.

I find that a lot of people dishonestly conflate the avoidance of critical thinking with finding an argument lacking. These two things are very much not the same thing.

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