Probably 70% of current college students should not be going. No real value add.
We will not be able to compete in the future if most of our smart people refuse to be educated.
We need good STEM people. We do not need a single new diversity studies major.
And for training, that died and is dead.
Take a young person. Train them up with a skill. Give them a hands on education. Invest thousands of dollars and a lot of man hours into them. Then watch them walk out the door for a $0.50 hr raise. Because you are training your competition.
That was the speech given to me by a senior manager once. He was requiring a degree for lab techs, and I was telling him if they can follow a cookie recipe I can teach them the test. He said “Red, if you train our competition I will fire you!”
My theory is that college enrollment exploded in the mid to late 1980s after movies such as Porkies and Animal House came out. After that a whole lot of people sought college for that type of experience. Coupled with “free” government Pell grants and other subsidies, college enrollment exploded into the current massive leftwing bureaucratic monolith it is today.
My oldest son went one semester and hated it. He became a police officer and loves it. My daughter took to college like a duck to water and will graduate in the spring as a nurse. My youngest son went one year and decided I’m wasting money because I don’t know what I want to do and dropped out. I said that’s fine but you go to work and he took a full time job as a butcher in a local meat department.
I think the trades are the way to go for many who don’t want the typical college track. One to two years and you get your certification a in HVAC, plumbing, welding etc... The old guard college instructors snort in derision at such things but they are stuck in 1990.
Unless you are pursuing a BS degree, you are wasting your money. Who the hell goes neck deep in debt for liberal arts?