People who take up STEM, are of course of different type, and for them, surely college is a net benefit. But that kind of people would go to college even 50 or 70 years ago already. All paranormal increase of college admissions in the last decades came from precisely those people who are getting those bullshit degrees just because they are the only ones they can get, and they feel compelled to get some kind of a college degree.

Even STEM degrees could be optimized. Most of what I've learned is not applicable to software dev, but at least some of the classes (like foreign language) were neat, although college classrooms are a suboptimal way to study that.

as a sw dev / sre / engineer with 10+ years of experience, i can say that without a doubt the skills one learns that are not hard STEM courses and programming are 100% useful. i need engineers with critical thinking, a sense of empathy, eloquence, and a host of other social skills that lots of nerds-turned-comp-sci-student lack

Outside of STEM classes, the only thing I learned that was relevant to my career was from my Technical Writing course, where I learned that people in charge can be capricious and screw you over in the process. The teacher didn't like me, so he consistently gave my work mediocre scores and couldn't quantify anything about the work or the scores.

Even some of the STEM classes were a waste of time, especially the Computer Science classes where the professor would grade people on attendance and random minutia.

I ended up just learning computer science on my own off of Wikipedia after I graduated since I couldn't get a decent hardware design job with my Electrical Engineering degree. It only took a couple of months, BTW, to get from the point where I was just playing around with JavaScript to where I could pass a coding interview laden with data structures and algorithms.

If I could go back in time for a day and talk to my former self, I'd tell him to just buy some used physics, math, and computer science textbooks, then spend six months couch surfing, partying, and studying on his own. Then he could go find a CS job and start making money right away

The UK government has taken a different approach to all-out anti-higher-ed. attack: cut 50% of the funding for many university arts courses, while keeping the overall budget fairly flat. In the UK media this is seen as an attack on "lefties", either justified or unwarranted, depending on the outlet.

https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/19-25-july-2021/funding-...

Do you have any actual numbers on BA vs BC (or BA vs BSc)?

There's value in the arts, but I think it is overrepresented in universities.

> I think it is overrepresented in universities

What would over-represented mean in this case? Here's a graph[1] of bachelors' degrees granted in various fields - the social science are grouped with history and are not particularly popular.

I'm personally somewhat mystified when people talk about degrees like they're ice cream flavors. I've met people with a wide variety of aptitude and interest and energy and while I think that anyone can get any degree, I do think we each individually have proclivities and talents. Even if I wanted to double the number of STEM majors, I suspect that many of the people who have chosen not to be STEM majors did that because they liked their chosen major better.

Edit: For what it is worth, I do think we could use many more people in the trades. I also think that people going to trade school should have the option to get the same "gen ed" college curriculum that people going to college get. It might help the idea that trade work is lesser (which, of course, it is not).

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cta#4

> it is overrepresented

Definitely relative to the available jobs in those fields.

Should college primarily function as job training? No, but unfortunately - for what it currently costs - it has to.