Then perhaps the real contribution to society is having our Starbucks coffee made by a barista with a masters in English literature? Maybe you could explain what you mean because I'm not getting it.
It's only our narrow age, that conflates education with training and value with economic utility, that would think of GDP as the only contribution.
Modern employment markets are simply more efficient in pricing the various components of human capital than they used to be; it used to be enough to be smart and good at anything challenging at all (the classical liberal arts value proposition is, I submit, fundamentally based on this idea). The "learning to learn" and "critical thinking" components of this education were valuable enough to demand a price premium relative to 1950s vocational education, but it's much harder to compete with a modern degree in (say) mathematics which, I claim, is at least as powerful in developing said meta-skills as a degree in literature (and has the added bonus of having direct economic value in many industries). Over time, market forces will adjust the prices for these two different investments accordingly.
Thinking purely economically (obviously, there's more to life than economics), education in a subject for which no one will pay and which has no measurable positive externalities is indistinguishable (to the market) from consumption. So I think the future for these kinds of degrees will hinge heavily on finding evidence of positive externalities, or accepting that a degree in medieval history is better compared to a seminary (i.e. no expectation of economic reward) than a medical school.
Edit/Note: I realize that mathematics degrees, done in certain ways, can fit inside the framework of a liberal arts education. However, all the mathematicians of my generation I know took as many math courses as possible within the requirements of their degree programs. I speculate that, even at liberal arts schools, mathematicians pursue much more concentrated curricula than the typical student.
Could you define "civilized human being", and perhaps explain what some of those ways are?
I.e., explain it to me like I'm 5.
So the purpose of college is indoctrination? Good to know.
Doctrine, other than political, is critical to civilization.
Firstly - The topic of education is itself complex and vast.
Secondly - the intersect of education with economic opportunity leaves you with a pretty crummy field filled with myriads of discussion failure points.
House rules of some sort are almost always needed.
Limit your discussion field when you start out, or the constraints/assumptions you are working on.
It serves to have a more productive discussion.
The liberal arts electives I picked up taught me critical thinking, which I think were worth more to me than all the CS components combined. Some people still seek out education as a way to be taught how to learn and think, rather than just a 3+ year job investment.
Is/was my degree useless? No way. Those 4 years of studying history and doing lots of research (I think I wrote around 15 papers in those years, around 70% of which were on subjects with little previous research done before) have taught me to choose my sources wisely, to reflect on my own thinking critically (this is a prime asset as a historian, you cannot uncritically let your own preconceptions of the world direct your decisions) and to generally try to see things (and especially abstractions and thought-systems) from as many different sides as possible. All great skills to have if you code for a living.
I might not be as well versed in theoretical computer science as a CS graduate from a good(!) program, but I am familiar enough with the territory that I can pick up new areas/technologies/algorithms rather quickly and it prevents me from getting the "I graduated in CS, I know everything and do not have to make any effort any more"-attitude that I've e.g. seen in my predecessor at the current job I have (he used unsalted md5-hashes for passwords, wrote Java classes that are >10k lines long and used a mix of zip-archives of his Eclipse-workbench and hundreds of commented-out LOCs as a form of version control)
Firstly, there are all sorts of arguments to be made for how a liberal education can actually end up being unexepectedly advantageous in a professional context. A fair number of the startup engineers I work with majored in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and they all bring interesting perspectives to the table. Steve Jobs has a fascinating anecdote about how a Typography class he dropped in on at Reed was the eventual inspiration for the proportionally spaced fonts of the first Macintosh.
As others have pointed out, studying a broad array of intellectual disciplines with any intensity ultimately will ultimately change the way you think, because even if you don't end up going into a profession directly related to them, creative thinking benefits greatly from the ability to synthesize new connections between seemingly disparate topics.
But there's still more to it than that. HN commenters love to philosophize, but many dismiss philosophy as such. We all have strong political opinions, but it's hard for me to imagine a functional political citizen that doesn't have a grasp of history, civics and the strains of thought that gave rise to our current civilization. We all consume art and music in some way, but presumably it's not worth studying. Or rather, I suspect many would prefer to continue deride those who waste their money and time on such an pursuit, while happily consuming the fruits of their labor. Even knowledge "for its own sake" is worthwhile if the end goal is personal enrichment. Personally, I'd prefer to live in a world with people whose educational prerogatives are not universally economically driven.
Whether higher education should cost so much, whether liberal arts grads are expecting too much upon graduation, and so on are for another conversation.
law degress seem more prevalent, looking at obama and romney alone.
I'm an engineering major myself so I'm acquainted with the disdain with which engineers view liberal arts types, but it's greatly misplaced. The simple fact is that outside STEM fields, college is more about signaling than education. It is the nature of non-STEM fields that you don't really need to know anything before you start the job. The purpose of college is to learn how to think abstractly and how to write, and to allow employers to separate out the smart, hard-working people.
[1] Amusingly, Harvard, a major feeder into the big New York banks, doesn't even have a finance major.
Schools like Harvard don’t do “professional” majors like that (there’s no “business”, “medicine”, “communications”, etc.). Even science and engineering students are mainly learning abstract tools rather than just being trained in some vocation.
Stephen Hawking read Natural Sciences for what it's worth.