Acting is an interesting example. While it isnt an economicly good idea, a large percentage of successful actors do get their start there, paticularly make actors who generally "break" into the business at an older age than female actors. Jim Parsons is the classic example. He had a masters in theatre and was in his mid-30s before his breakout on the big bang theory. He became the highest-paid male actor on TV.

Compare Kaley Cuoco who broke at aged fifteen (Growing up Brady) and i do not believe ever finished traditional highschool.

Jim Parsons went to one of the top ten MFA Acting programs in the country. It's extremely competitive.

WVU's MFA program doesn't even rate and I don't think has a single notable alumni among them.

Well, one university cannot have a "top" program without some other universities having bottom or at least not-top programs. For excellent people to climb to the top of the pile, there has to be a pile of not-excellent on which to climb.

Knowing that why would you ever climb into the bottom of the pile?

Not everyone who takes acting classes wants to become an actor. I'm in the military and I can say that more military people should take acting classes. I've seen drill sergeants who are totally unable to fake being angry and so come out looking just crazy because they don't understand how to play a character, and generals who cannot make a simple speech without getting people angry for no reason. Even a bottom-of-the-pile acting classes would help them.

Improv classes is probably a better choice. It's still acting, but you're doing it on the fly, which is a lot more useful IMO than being able to prepare precanned lines.

It still requires you to warm up and do exercises, though.

There is a lot to recommend about regular acting as a life skill. It requires text analysis as well as understanding a wide array of people. It's deeply dependent on communicating abstract ideas.

Being able to come up with ideas quickly is great, but conventional acting is about considering deeply and exploring ideas together. The preparation for those "precanned" lines requires a ton of work, work that people don't understand or recognize, but they know when they connect with a performance, and it's all due to that preparation.

In short it's all those "soft skills" that techies both deride and bemoan the lack of.

It takes hours and hours of practice to do improvisation, especially at high level, and it can be deep exploration of ideas as well though long form improv shows.

It also requires you to observe and listen well.

Absolutely. I did not intend to demean improv, which is an incredibly useful skill and also great practice for a lot of analogous situations.

I just wanted to briefly defend conventional acting as well, which is poorly understood. (Partly by deliberate choice; actors do like to tell myths about their craft.) As both an actor and programmer myself, I find a number of overlapping skills.

I suspect a few classes at UCB theater or with the groundlings would be a more economical route to improv skills.

https://ucbcomedy.com/trainingcenter/course/#1-search=improv

Nevertheless, this doesn't sound sustainable for a university to fund programs for this limited purpose.

But then we're not talking about an MFA-level program are we...