I may be wrong here--I often am--but I do suspect that a majority of these Freepers who condemn certain students' majors--have never seen the inside of a college classroom.
I base this upon the complete ignorance of their posts. They believe that unless your major is in engineering or some such "practical" subject, you are worthless in the job market, notwithstanding the fact that a college education confers upon students the ability to think rationally, write well, read comprehensively, and the overall "polish" that one receives, all valuable skills and personal presentation that a good college education confers upon an individual.
All the attributes above explain why the well-to-do traders and other personnel on Wall Street may well have majored in English, British literature, etc.
No, they think of college as a form of trade school and unless the student studies something they can relate to outside of welding and plumbing (and it seems that "engineering" is the "other" that they know of that's taught in college), it's no damn good.
You made my point... thanks..
Agreed, but I'd qualify that. Some of the most anti-intellectual people I know are conservatives who got the required degrees for their fields, bitterly hated their liberal professors, became successful in their fields not because of what they learned in college but because their own abilities or their self-study enabled them to use the “certification” given by their degree, and have now become vehement haters of academia because they think it's worthless, not having seen what liberal arts education is supposed to be.
Our Founding Fathers were highly, highly educated men. We are conservatives who advocate educating “the masses” to become educated citizens capable of casting intelligent votes. That is key to the American experiment. We are not Communists who extol the virtues of a dumbed-down proletariat or European elitists who think the unwashed masses should be placated with some freebies when their complaints can no longer be ignored.
Conservatives think — or at least we should. If we aren't, there's a problem.