Is Working College?

Oh look! Another blogger cashing in on the Arrington echo chamber!

Wall Street Executives.

I mean, who else, right?

The right job.

With all this talk of vocational training versus a real degree, I assert that a college degree without some form of Liberal Arts grounding is no degree at all.

Nobody plans on having a worthless degree after school, and no educator wishes to leave their student ill-equipped. No one wants to work at the Gap in the first place, and whether they have a degree in Communications or not is irrelevant.

Education, like a trip to the hospital, is a practice in fighting for yourself and getting what you came for.

yes you need Liberal Arts classes as extra on top, to get the full package of shaping yourself as an individual. Granted, maybe not as much as they currently make people take...right now you take more B.S. classes to round yourself, than classes that actually have to do with your major.

The problem with b.s. liberal arts degrees like Communications, is that you are majoring in the Extra. You don't have that core technical/analytical shaping of the mind through the "hard" classes. You are majoring in the fluff. I mean hell, take math for example, communications majors pretty much end their math curriculum, at the same level they ended in High School.

There is definitely a demand for those "fluff" skills that many engineers like myself cannot fulfill. There are many great careers out there that don't require math beyond the high school level. Don't look down upon them just because they have passions in other areas.

But a lot of people make a lot of money off their people skills, and math doesn't matter one bit. Negotiating a big contract takes a lot of skill you may not see, but little math apart from arithmetic.

I'm not sure what you think the "liberal arts" are, but mathematics is definitely one of them.

You know, for a lot of students nowadays "high school math" means calculus. And as far as I was aware that's still considered fairly advanced.

You have a point, but don't forget that there are technical, analytical, and even quantitative aspects to the most fluffy-sounding fields.

It really depends on the program that you're attending. A well rounded Philosophy department will produce better hackers than a poorly-focused Computer Science department.

Not your kind of grossly capitalistic hacking. :)

I lived in a so called socialistic state for the first five years of my live. That's enough for a whole live.

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