Looking at it from the other side: maybe most would have become decent engineers, but a large number wouldn't have the maturity to apply themselves.
They would be unhappy because they didn't know the landscape of their profession - students get a taste of everything.
Some need a safe space to develop life skills they didn't learn at home: self-reliance, communication...
And yeah, signalling. Because starting at a job now is hard, getting fired is risky. The English major has the maturity, the goal and the life skills. He already has less risk with his degree. The bootcamp kid? Not so much. The bootcamp history major? Good!
The English major (assuming a good liberal education) is well-placed to understand his or her role as an engineer. He or she probably well knows how much there is to learn!
Of course, as you point out, a "large number" won't apply themselves, and won't become engineers, but they'll still have a well-rounded education. So if I was advising a smart youngster on how to get a job writing software in 6-8 years, I'd advise them to study English or Math or Physics or History before computer science. Pick a general concentration in the humanities or sciences that interests you and learn everything you can about the world through the lens of that field. Then go and pick up some programming languages, do an online masters program in the hot tech du jour, and write some code and get an internship or a job. Whatever you do, don't waste your chance at a university education studying computer science if that's what you want to do. The curriculum will bore you, it will move too slowly in all the wrong directions, and you'll pick up a bunch of obsolete preconceptions that you'll be poorly equipped to discard later.
Of course this has implications for what CS programs should be doing and mostly aren't, but that's neither here nor there.
No, I'm disagreeing. Kids just out of highschool are not full adults. They should be able to learn to apply themselves while not losing the chance to be an engineer. University allows for that freedom, an apprenticement doesn't.
Universities are win-win-win for people, bosses and government. Especially for the majority, the average students who can't retrain or self-study as easily. And the minorities, parents without degrees, middle and lower class or even outside the family business.
Aside, I was that smart youngster, I chose math, I wouldn't gave graduated. English would have been much worse. I was bored but at least not burned out. And I have used every course practically, 6 years of education and almost nothing that can be reliably scrapped to create a bootcamp.
Kids out of high school would have been parents already or within a few years in most of human history. We keep them infantilized but that is a feature of our culture, not what kids are capable of. You could say a 30 year old isn't a "full adult" either, assuming you continue to mature and grow, right?
My question is why do we think it's better to put all the learning for a particular career at the front of your life when you have no experience, and don't even know why you're going to need to know any of what you're learning? It's wasteful to learn something you think you're going to use and then find yourself in a career you prepared for and don't like. The average 18 year old doesn't know much about adult life (because we insulate them from it more and more) and has no idea what a professional in most fields actually does every day, so why do we expect them to pick an occupation before having any experience in it and then commit themselves to it for an intensive course of study?
I'm not arguing against university education, if it is truly general. But if it is just a passport to a particular career path, which is increasingly the case, then (a) it's too early to pick a career, and (b) if you want a career, and know what you want, it makes more sense to start working first and then learn what you need according to the demands of the work. That's why I'm in favor of continuing education and apprenticeships, and in general having more diverse life paths rather than trying to fit everyone to the same pattern, which is what seems to be happening now with college being expected for everyone.
Obviously there are careers like medicine that are going to require additional intensive training, and that needs to be front-loaded for obvious reasons. However, most people are working longer and changing careers more than in the past, and the ability to learn as you go should be more valuable to society than expecting that everyone get a university education while at the same time turning universities into trade schools.
And yeah, signalling. Because starting at a job now is hard, getting fired is risky. The English major has the maturity, the goal and the life skills. He already has less risk with his degree. The bootcamp kid? Not so much. The bootcamp history major? Good!