And to what degree is college/university about learning for the sake of learning, versus training for getting a “real” job, a “real” career? Or should be?

I have two BA’s and two MA’s. The BA’s, it could be argued, are “worthless”: One is in Theater and one is in Hebrew. But I value the education that both gave me, some of it practical (I can operate an industrial sewing machine, I can do basic electrical wiring, my carpentry skills are not too shabby) and some of it seemingly less so (thanks to multitudinous classes in theater lit and theater history, I have a much better sense of world history and literature than the average bear).

I think one of the real problems with higher education is that we have hit a point where if Pizza Hut wants to hire someone, they need a degree in pepperoni slicing. So, we are churning out people with degrees in pepperoni slicing: overly narrow and overly specialized. And “underly” necessary as an academic discipline. Plus, as an added bonus, we are getting people who really are not particularly well-educated. That is to say, they have bad writing skills, poor grammar, little knowledge of much outside of their field, and next to no knowledge of what once basically was the hallmark of an “educated” person: familiarity with world and American history, world and American literature, the Western music canon, and Western art; and a basic knowledge of math and science. Who graduates with a degree in human resources and has any idea about what makes Bach so special?

Once upon a time, there was the theory that if you were intelligent enough to get a degree, you were intelligent enough to learn the job. (In the “fuzzier” fields, like, oh, say, journalism or publishing, a degree in English Lit was the way to go. Obviously, if you wanted to be a mechanical engineer, well, a BA in English wouldn’t help you much. Though, once upon a time, people didn’t go to school to become engineers, they apprenticed to do so.) There were basic requirements for any degree, which have now devolved into “distributional requirements” that can be fulfilled by taking the most mindless of classes.

I am also not sure how “worthless” it is to study things like ancient Near Eastern philology. Sure, there aren’t scads of Mesopotamians in need of translators these days, but I think studying some of the more abstruse things is a worthwhile endeavor.

Loretta E. Sheridan