Besides, nothing prevents one from pursuing a career in most liberal arts without a degree, assuming you don't want to be a researcher. You can always be a nurse or an engineer with arts related side-job, but doing it the other way around is hard.
If I were to make a list of the problems with the world, having too many people with liberal arts degrees would not be anywhere near that list.
Too few, yes. Too many business school graduates, yeah. Too many law school graduates, probably. Too many STEM field graduates, maybe. Too many graduates who look at people as a resource to be extracted, or an abstraction to be ignored. But damnit, we need more people who care about the quality of human experience.
The university were founded largely for the sake of teaching the liberal arts, that is, the free arts (as opposed to the servile arts). I am using the traditional meaning of "liberal arts", and not the tragedy we have now. The university was supposed to educate the man, to mature him intellectually, to free him to be able to pursue the truth and to do so effectively which meant also the ability to draw from and participate in the tradition.
The feverish mission to push everyone through college is a fool's errand. It is not for everyone. The result is that universities had to change to make this possible, thus failing their founding mission. But at the same time, they aren't good at vocational training. So for most people, it's a waste of time and money.
We would be much better off with a system of vocational schools and apprenticeships. This would unburden universities and free them to pursue their original mission, and it would enable vocational schools/apprenticeships to provide excellent training for workers.
Primary education is, frankly, in an awful state as well, as it, too, is supposed to educate the man, and it is here where the vocational stuff is still not necessary to learn even for those who will eventually enter the vocations.
We're seeing some interesting developments in both primary education (with the spread of classical education) and the founding of small colleges that aim to avoid the failure of the university. Some try to combine intellectual formation with an apprenticeship program to try to reconcile the desire to form the man with the need to find a job. Apprenticeship is also used to cover at least part of the costs of the education.
Ballooning costs are a symptom of corruption and bloat. The mission is lost, so it's a numbers game now. There's no reason a university education should cost anywhere near what it costs today, especially given the mediocrity of the education. I don't really see much will to change the status quo among those in power, so we'll probably see a combination of hamfisted maneuvers like debt cancellation to maintain the status quo, but ultimately, probably a collapse of the system.
Healthcare as a whole baffles me. They pay well enough, sometimes, but they also just treat their employees like absolute crap. Would it really break the bank to hire 25% more staff instead of having your entire workforce getting paid overtime week after week?
Them stocks gotta to up, mang.
Take a look at the Fortune 500, and look at how many healthcare companies are publicly traded and in the top 100.
That dog don't hunt when that 'well rounded education' costs tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars and will burden the students for the rest of their lives. Once the student is on the hook for that debt, it becomes a strict return on investment calculation.
Want to study philosophy? By all means! It's among the most important subjects humanity can study, but you probably shouldn't be seeking a degree in it if you don't wish to teach it, and you damned sure shouldn't be condemned to serfdom because of it.
2. Even without graduate education requirements, other fields have loooong ramp-up times but eventually end up doing well.
3. There are also jobs that are extremely valuable to society despite the expense of education (nursing comes to mind, as does teaching).
4. We would end up with stupid boom-bust cycles in labor supply and demand, even worse than what we have now. Reducing labor supply by making loans unavailable increases labor prices eventually, which eventually results in loans becoming available, which saturates supply, and then repeat the cycle every couple decades. Constant idiotic predicable crises. Welcome to myopic financial capitalism, where trust fund kids who never needed to pass their delay differential equations unit have all the power.
So to make this work you need some form of central planning of supply and demand -- by DECADES at a time. Who knew we'd need so many Python programmers in 1980 or even 2000? Which, if that predictive function works, why the FUCK are we using markets anyway?! Cut out the middle man if central planning works. (It doesn't.)
How about we just lose the cold war brain-rot and stop trying to use markets -- a legal fiction and policy tool!!! -- where they make no fucking sense. Markets are an incoherent solution to allocation problems where price signals are EXTREMELY delayed (education) or EXTREMELY coercive (health). Just fund it with tax dollars instead.
The market religion zombie from the red scare era needs to die. The amount of absolute brain rot in the American public caused by the inability to understand that markets are just fucking tools that depend on government coercion anyways is sending our entire society into a death spiral.
It's somehow unsurprising that the one true American religion of the 21st century -- deference to The Troops -- is the place where we're completely okay with socialism in higher education (the military academies).