[learc83]

I don't think you're really agreeing with the OP. The OP didn't say anything about not making you take classes that aren't directly focused on your career.

Those classes are what make college different from trade school. You may think it sounds like a meaningless platitude now when you just want hurry up and be done with the whole thing, but many of those "extraneous" classes will make you a more rounded person if you allow them to.

I'm a vastly different person at 33 than I was at 18, I'm interested in different things now partly because I was exposed to subjects I wasn't particularly interested in at the time. 15 years later, I'm glad that my past self sat through art history, biology, and economics.

[zigzigzag]

The problem with insisting on roundness, which has been a focus of the education system for years, is that it generates tons of generic shapeless people who specialise in nothing and find themselves unable to obtain the best, high paying jobs.

In my family, myself and my brother have been successful by focusing on one or two skills and honing them. That was made much harder by the education system, which fought us the whole way, because it sees specialisation as some sort of problem when it is in fact the solution. In my brother's case the school tried to insist he went to university. He didn't, as he knew full well what he wanted to do and reckoned, correctly, he would do better without being a student. In my case the university insisted that I take non-CS classes despite that I was paying them for a CS course. The classes were interesting, but marked arbitrarily (i.e. one essay at the end and who knows how it's evaluated?). I nearly got kicked out of CS because of a single essay written on archaeology!

As I go through life, I constantly encounter people who thought they were "learning how to learn" or "learning how to think" when they went to university, only to discover after graduation that they had no particular skills and were seem as essentially worthless by the job market. It's tremendously depressing for them and creates constant, lifelong insecurity.

Critical thinking abilities are something you want on top but are not a substitute for actual, hard skills. And they are certainly not something a university can teach - please. All the stats and studies show that universities are incredibly ideologically homogenous and rapidly stamp out any political thought that deviates from their left wing consensus. Universities teach people that thinking and disagreement are dangerous, that opinions are "triggering", and speaking out loud leads to exclusion. They're the last place on earth I'd expect critical thinking skills to emerge unscathed.

[adrusi]

I'm a humanities student and not on the left. My experience with leftist professors is that even if they try to actively push their politics on students, they will still give As to papers with well-reasoned dissenting views on highly political topics, immigration for instance. The only unfairness is that students who just repeat everything the professor says in their paper will get an easy grade without much thinking but I don't know what can be done about that, unless professors are to penalize unoriginality. The groupthink isn't an obstacle to critical thinking, it's just an excuse to avoid it.

Critical thinking skills aren't something to have on top of domain-specific skills, they're something to have as a foundation for them. If you focus on critical thinking skills in lieu of anything domain specific, and expect to get a job without further learning, you're foolish, but you'll have an easier time learning the specific skills you need for practical work anyway.

[ticviking]

My degree was in Social Studies education, and I suspect you underestimate the degree to which groupthink is pushed in social sciences, and $area Studies. Especially when compared to the humanities.

The humanities have a long tradition of debate and disagreement as a path to seeking the truth, that is sometimes lacking in sociology or political science.

[RGS1811]

Right. While I actually believe society (and students) would benefit by converting a large fraction of our "liberal arts" colleges into more practical trade schools, your point stands—the problem with the "choose your own adventure" model of undergraduate education is that 18-22 year olds are distinctly bad at choosing the adventure that's best for them, especially when it comes to getting a liberal education. Trade schools for STEM and the trades, but stronger core curricula and less highly-specialized BS in the humanities.

[Chris2048]

biology and economics aren't humanities. But as for art history - how much would you pay for such an education, specifically?

[learc83]

Where did I argue that biology and economics are humanities, and how is that relevant to my post?

The OP said that they only wanted to take classes directly relevant to their future career. Biology and economics are examples of classes that I didn't think were relevant to my career (at the time).

>But as for art history - how much would you pay for such an education, specifically?

The first time I went to college I had a full ride scholarship, so I didn't pay a dime. The second time I paid, and I took another art history class. I think I paid about $1500 total for that course.