There’s a distinction to be made between a college degree and an education. Practically everyone in the workforce today gets the former. Based on the evidence I see around me, fewer and fewer people (as a percentage of the populace) are getting the latter.
In times past, getting a college education meant the same thing, regardless of one’s nominal field of study: acquiring a general familiarity with a broad range of knowledge, learning to assimilate new information quickly (primarily from reading), learning to synthesize new ideas and concepts from one’s store of information and observations, and learning to communicate what one had learned or created to others.
Until well into this century, the notion of a college degree as a credential for employment scarcely entered anyone’s mind. Men (primarily) attended college in order to train their minds. Even the concept of a “major” field of study is a relatively recent development. Advanced degrees, in particular, were rare, even among leading figures in the various fields.
The classical college education, however, did not readily lend itself to being scaled up to provide for practically everyone in the population, and as a greater degree of specific technical information became necessary to successfully practice certain professions, credentialization overtook education as the expected outcome of the college experience for many people. The technical indoctrination that was once the province of apprenticeships and other on-the-job training was assumed by colleges in a bid to enroll greater and greater numbers of students, and was overlaid on the traditional role of colleges, resulting in institutional factions working toward different goals in an uneasy marriage that persists today.
Which is fine, so far as it goes. However, a narrowly defined course of technical training in a particular occupational field (what most college graduates acquire today) leaves one vulnerable in our rapidly changing economy to the same fate that befell workers in any number of industries through the twentieth century: the skills and knowledge they acquired became obsolete, in some cases almost overnight, and they found themselves ill-equipped to change horses in midstream. Until recently, this type of job obsolescence affected mainly non-degreed workers in skilled trades who’d invested years in learning a trade that died, but now it’s creeping up on the degreed professionals as well.
The more traditional college education, regardless of the nominal field of study, better prepares one to adapt to changing conditions, provides a broader base of information and experience to draw from in defining and solving problems, enables one to consider a greater subset of the possible contingencies in evaluating situations, and is more likely to provide the communication skills required to direct and persuade others. In short, it is ideal preparation for even the most technical of professions today, since it’s likely that today’s students will spend a significant portion of their working careers performing jobs that don’t even exist today.
Certainly, my perspective is skewed by my personal preferences and experience, but my story might be considered illustrative of the point I’m making. I majored in English at a small liberal arts college. Immediately after college, I enrolled in a Ph.D. program in English lit. at a well-regarded major university. I grew to dislike the majority of my fellow students and most of the professors as well, and decided to bail out before I got in any deeper (halfway through my second year). I began working as a proofreader for an advertising agency. At that point, I was making one-quarter to one-third of what some other recent college graduates with technical or business degrees were making. Within five years, however, I was vice-president of a successful software company, making more than those same technically trained coevals. People asked me then, and still do, whether I regret getting a degree that I “don’t use”. The premise of the question is absurd; while I rarely have occasion to discuss with a colleague the fine points of Keats’ artistry in “To Autumn” or to translate an Old English poem like The Battle of Maldon, the things I really learned in college – how to gather information, assess it, develop new information from it, and communicate that to others – are precisely the things that have made me successful to this point and that give me confidence in facing whatever comes along next. So I’d say that the worst degree is one that prepares you for a specific job at the expense of allowing you to get an education.