Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Free tuition at US public Universities?

You leave this topic for 24 hours and pages are written.

No one said that the arts were not important, but we were talking about job prospects. And if you saw the recent jobs report, they are disappearing rapidly.

Who is suppose to subsidize your kid during and after school because they wanted to learn to be a creative thinker and then let someone else get creative after he/she graduates on how they should put that creative talent to use?

Now with all the creative talent you learned in school, you should come up with a good answer. I, who took engineering, think practically. Job prospects = tuition subsidies. If you want something that doesn't link into job prospects, pay your own way.

And that is the way I was brought up in my middle class neighborhood in Canada. The fathers fought in WW2, got educated, bought a home, had kids and told us that we go to college to get a job, like they did, 95% of whom were engineers. And the kids did. They became engineers, doctors, dentists, physical therapists, accountants. Or, if college didn't work for them, they got a trade like boiler maker, pipe fitter, electrician. I do not know anyone I went to high school that thought about going to get a liberal arts degree to learn to be creative. And even my school roommate, who now has a MFA, chairs the art department at a high school because it pays the mortgage. Practical education.

Over the last few years, I’ve interviewed more than 200 young people from diverse backgrounds of income, education, race and geography. About half told me that they had liberal arts degrees, and I was struck by how many of them regretted majoring in a discipline now seen as impractical.

Many liberal-arts graduates say they are eager to find an employer willing to train them in skills that don’t require a degree in engineering or computer science. They cite six-sigma analysis, supply-chain procedures, customer service, inventory control, quality assurance and Internet marketing. They want a chance to master one of those skills.

But their pleas appear unlikely to be answered. Most corporate training today is directed at employees who arrive with technical skills already developed — if not through their college degrees, then though specialized internships.

This puts a large swath of young people at a disadvantage. Burdened with tuition debt, many college graduates from low- and middle-income families can’t afford to serve a low-paying or unpaid internship.

I’ve been consulting for more than four decades. Twenty or 30 years ago, a hiring manager at a Fortune 500 company was much more willing to give, say, a dance major a chance. That manager would realize that such graduates were good at teamwork, acquiring new skills and practicing for long hours. Give them some corporate training and they become productive employees, was the thinking.

Now, because of a relentless focus on specialized skills, too many young people are missing out on a rite of passage: getting to a job on time, learning a craft, assuming responsibility, bringing home a paycheck. The unemployment rate for people age 20 to 24 is 11 percent, compared with an overall rate that is under 7 percent.