The Case for Federal Intervention in Math Education

[ericson00]

5. Fareed is not a good example

because his success in life doesn't owe to any liberal education. It owes to the name of the school on his piece of paper. You can graduate Yale with no skills and get a better job 9 out of 10 times ahead of the guy who has the actual skills. There's only 60,000 Ivy League undergrads currently enrolled out there; there's tens of millions of college students who cannot rely on such extreme prestige alone.

I do think every student should come away with a liberal component of education, but it needs to be done in a way where they actually learned something in school that they could not teach themselves but that can be shown and done, not just thought or opined. For example, poli sci at top schools involved a decent amount of statistics. At mediocre or lesser schools, it's an opinion class essentially. Same for other non-technical disciplines.