've met a lot of young people who see "gen ed" courses as things to be gotten out of the way. There's no love of learning and often limited curiosity about courses outside one's chosen field. And this is hardly surprising given that we encourage C students and other students with little academic aptitude to head to college.
So all this makes college more of a form of job training and less of a mechanism for creating educated people who are well-rounded and thoughtful.
And then people do studies that measure what graduating students have learned and find out that the answer is "not much:" they can't reason or write any better than they could on day one. And for some reason, everyone is surprised and mystified.
I went to college a while ago, but not THAT long ago (I'm not yet 40) at a small, quirky liberal arts school with no frats or sororities that is in the top 25 colleges nationwide. College was nothing like this for me at all. Admittedly I surrounded myself with bright and interesting people, but they weren't hard to find. Most of the alums I know are doing fascinating things. However, not many of them are making money, and certainly some of our grads are fulfilling the "loser liberal arts grad" stereotype--that is, they have a degree in philosophy and work at Starbucks. They are probably pretty interesting to talk to, though, and they may well be pursuing art or something else worthwhile on the side. Oh, laugh if you like. I don't care. The world is a bit of a hard and dreary place, and at 24, I'm not convinced that depressed newbie corporate drone is doing that much better than Starbucks dude, though admittedly, he/she is probably not living at home and is asaving something for retirement. BTW, some numbers are in and most parents of the kids who are boomeranging back to live at home don't appear to mind. It's on the Pew Research site, if anyone's interested...
