This isn't a popular opinion right now, and with good reason -- colleges are expensive and many young people are encouraged to take on a financial burden that might last 10 or 20 years without really understanding the ramifications of that -- but, I'd like to argue that a college education shouldn't primarily be thought of as a job training center... Or, like, the focus of college shouldn't be about going somewhere in order to get training for a job when you leave. I know that often is the perception of it, but I don't think it should be. On average, people change careers about three times in their working life, not jobs, but actual careers, and I think when we focus college too much on being a job training program, then it can be very focused on what the "hot" job is today and not necessarily on the skills and education that makes it possible for someone to adapt to a new career later in their life, when today's "hot" job is yesterday's telephone repairman.
I think there's hirable value in the liberal arts -- writing, critical thinking, critical reading -- and that focusing too much on what someone's job prospects are for a given major is the wrong focus. Most colleges don't require someone to choose a major until their 2nd year... Unless it's a very specific discipline (say, an engineering school where a person is pretty likely to already be going into an engineering focus, or maybe something like Pre-med), and I'd encourage students to go into college with an open mind about what they might study. They might have a particular direction to go into ... computer science, healthcare, business, or something... but I'd encourage someone to use their gen eds in their first 2 years to consider majoring in a subject that they didn't think was interesting when they went into college, that they ended up loving. This happened with me, I went in planning to major in Computer Science, I really struggled my freshman and sophomore year in the basic math and physics classes I needed for Comp Science at the time, but ended up loving classes that I thought, at the time, were just classes to cross off my list on gen-eds... Political science and philosophy. I'm a software engineer today, but I genuinely don't think that I would have had the job opportunities I've had since graduating (eh... 15 years ago) if I stuck with computer science. I don't know if I would have even graduated college if I stuck with computer science... I didn't know how to learn, and I learned how to learn with those other disciplines. There's a lot of bias in hiring in my industry against applicants who did not go the traditional engineering route, but as a person who is on hiring teams, I look for people who did not take that traditional role into engineering... Maybe they had a liberal arts background, or floated around in other industries, before coming into computer science, I think they can be really valuable on the right team. I'm very interested in the English major turn law school flunky who is now looking to break into computer science and software development, I think they can learn some of the core skills they missed in college, while having skills that are underepresented in the industry. Unfortunately, that's just not a popular opinion in the software industry today.
Especially today, so many questions in software design are not technical questions, but ethical questions and I think as an industry we're done a disservice because we've failed to hire diverse educational backgrounds. The software industry seems to confound the general public today with good reason, it seems like there's a new article every week where the general public is aghast at a software company doing something so obviously unethical -- advertising to children, selling personal data to help sway an election, allowing politicians to blatantly lie on a platform and make money off of it -- but I think it's so obvious why there's this disconnect ... So many of these companies are founded and primarily motivated by people who have never taken an ethics class in their life, or they scoffed at having to take a philosophy, writing, literature, or politics class in college ... One of those "ugh, what's the point of this, how will American Literature 203 get me a job...?" attitudes. I think that contributes to this blindness and lack of human empathy in big tech today, we've been so focused on solving technical problems for so long, engineering challenges, that we've missed that we're supposed to be building software in service of humans, not in service of itself.
I don't think that this is a new phenomenon, but a worsening phenomenon.
