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I've heard some variation of this many many times, and remain very unconvinced. General education in university isn't the norm around the world. Are non-americans all hyper-specialized people who know nothing else of the world? Are people who didn't go to university the same? Did someone do a study at some point and conclude that general ed was important or do these general ed requirements exist purely because they are tradition?

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> General education in university isn't the norm around the world.

And it shows.

I was recently at a training for $ELITE_HIRING_COMPANY and as part of this they asked us to discuss some liberal arts style questions. The international hires who had been answering business questions all day suddenly were extremely confused at the question itself and had nothing to add (and it wasn't a language problem).

You might argue that those skills are not substantive or valuable, and perhaps we just learned in school to parrot reasonable sounding responses, but it was a stark contrast.

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