Most universities have general education requirements that apply to all majors. The problem with liberal arts is that the colleges have done a poor job marketing their product and, in many cases, have been taken over by activists. Students don’t want to spend four years being lectured by aging hipsters who still talk about Woodstock or the day they burned their draft cards.
Attitudes have also changed. In the past, college was the place for a young man or woman to “find himself while broadening his horizons”. After four years, they go to law school, med school, MBA or other education.
Today, students enter college with the goal of getting a degree that will land them a well paying job upon graduation. Henry V is nice, but neither the play nor the king will go as far as top skills in PowerPoint and Photoshop when applying for the entry level position at an marketing agency.
A waste.
No reason you can’t do both. Powerpoint skills can be learned over a day seminar. It’s not going to take you 4 years.
In my defense, I never studied literature. I'm a writer at my core. But yes, knowing how to manipulate data in Excel, write powerful proposals in Word, create riveting presentations in PowerPoint, and programming basic DBs in Access are critical in most industries. However, employers have gone to taking the word of the interviewee without even validating their claims.
For instance, we hired a woman with an MBA. She had all the pedigree, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, etc. She claimed a WPM (word per minute) of 100 on her application. I've personally been clocked (by a computer program) at 81 WPM, and I'm one of those people who hear "Damn, burning up that keyboard, eh?" So wasn't I surprised when she started her first day and was pecking out emails with her index fingers on her keyboard.
When confronted by the boss on this little resume faux pas, she admitted that she was told to put it on there by a recruiter. We all had a good chuckle at her expense. She was laid off shortly thereafter for botching a report to finance; something she should've learned in school.
Moral of the story here: universities can teach book knowledge and rote memorization, but they cannot teach practical skills that are valuable in the workplace. Even the most pedigreed of graduates seldom leave understanding how to do a pivot table in Excel or even modify the margins in a Word document.
Sad.