do you have the money to spend? Many of my family members got liberal arts degrees, and they felt enriched by the experience. I know visiting them, it sure looked like they were having a good time, meeting interesting people, etc.

Me, I got a SysAdmin job rather than going to school, and continued on in that direction. Sure, when I was my sister's age, I made 5x what she does now, but I don't think that was her primary reason for going to school.

I mean people spend that much on cars that aren't any more utilitarian than a $15,000 civic, so why not spend it learning an interesting skill while living around interesting people?

Money's freedom, tho'. How many foreign countries could you visit, how many experiences could you have, for the price of a 4-year liberal arts degree?

It's harsh but there are only 2 types of people in college. Those studying towards the field they want to work in, and those pursuing a hobby full-time. The latter would be better served spending the money on first-hand experiences instead of reading about it other people's second-hand.

This is an excellent view. The books are there to read, the art is there to view. College can motivate a person who is interested in grades, but not someone interested in the subject. You do lose out on the professor reading a book to you, but you could just read it yourself. Also, the professor isn't there to answer your questions, but, you might ask them via email. Some professors might feel delighted to discuss their subject with a genuinely interested party, rather than a grade seeker.

I think the most important thing you miss out on is the ease of finding peers to discuss the subject with. My degree was in math and physics, and, while I didn't talk to many people about physics (which I feel I don't know very well, btw), I had a good friend in math, and we would often hang out and discuss it. We took a lot of the same classes together (even outside of math), because we got so much out of our discussions.

I think we have a logic/emotion split about college, where logically we know college costs lots of actual money and should be regarded as an investment, but our emotions have been manipulated to think of college as a certain kind of life-validating experience.

So the decision to go to college is governed by the logic of college as investment, but then the content part is guided by the emotion of college as personal self-realization.

So we end up with a society where countless people pour thousands of dollars into attending college for fundamentally emotional reasons. Or even worse, for mistaken factual reasons about the practical benefit of their education.

In other words, as Ted Rall put it even before college costs doubled, college is for suckers:

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/cruz/09.26.96/student-9639...

That is a good article. A classic. A key part of it for me is:

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Although America's universities are churning out a steady stream of brain-dead simpletons, our society relies almost exclusively on college credentials as the central determining factor of social status and employment opportunities.

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I know it is a farce. But I also want the HR departments across the country to know that too. (I guess the lesson is: don't work for companies that consider college degree + GPA as the main determinant for your employment criteria).