Employers often demand a four-year degree, but they don't really know why. They'll test you on your technical skills, but not on those "soft" skills -- writing, understanding requirements, negotiating, collaborating -- and then complain when you don't have them.

Such things are hard to define and hard to test for. STEM majors regularly complain, loudly, about the fuzziness of the classes that teach those skills. I believe that we could all do a better job of explaining why many of the most important things are hard to measure, and some of that starts with (for example) teaching programmers that their job is to understand what the client really wants. Which is practically never being able to sort a list in .02 milliseconds rather than .03 milliseconds.

I don't know if American liberal arts educations are any better than English universities at cranking out students who can think for themselves. While they do get an extra year, full of courses that should be able to help them think about and communicate about what people think and feel, they often treat those as blow-off requirements. The classes are often uninspiring. They are hard to teach, but I think we could do better at trying to show why the notion is important.