My experience is that you are wrong. I went to an engineering school (RPI) back in the 60s because I had no patience for anything that couldn't be expressed in a formula like F=Ma. Now I'm different and I think that taking a year of Atomic and Nuclear Physics was probably the most useless thing I ever did. I go back to the schools my kids attended and participate in "liberal arts" classes. To be sure I rarely, if ever, take a class in something that includes the word studies in its course title; and my kids did go to prestigious schools. My experience has been that the kids in those classes I've participated in are extremely bright, articulate, thoughtful. What other adjectives should I use. It is a dangerous myth that these kids are all mind numbed robots. That may be the way it is these days at CCNY, but it isn't that way at the schools the kids in the top ten of their HS graduating classes attend if they attended any sort of competitive HS.
ML/NJ
If you’re only talking about the top 1% of each high school, then you are excluding 99% of the student body. You can concentrate only on the ‘elite’, just as this administration does, but you do a disservice to the real working people that make this country run.
And you are ignoring the stats that show that a BA in almost anything is worth just the paper it is printed on. A technical degree, however, is in demand and pay for those majors far exceeds the easier degrees. (joboutlook.com is one such site)
You can just look at yourself and how it didn’t work out for you. And you can look at a handful of other people. But making a generalization out of a low sampling pool isn’t accurate. And you are pretty biased.