To the average American high school student a higher education is a lofty goal, even though a third of them drop out, getting that diploma will offer happiness and success. But what happens when Billy and Suzy don’t have the appropriate grey matter to grasp college curriculum?

The art of dumbing down something as complicated as a university is a tricky one. If you dumb down the engineering program you get falling bridges and dead people. If you dumb down political science, well you just get more NDP voters. The thing that politicians and the university presidents failed to grasp is that while creating more NDP voters is not a good thing in the short-run, it’s a disastrous thing in the long run. There is nothing more dangerous to the future of a society than half-educated liberal arts majors.

What do you do with a liberal arts degree?

You rule over people who didn’t take liberal arts.

Who do you think runs much of the mid and even high bureaucracy? Where do you think the bulk of political staffers, speech writers and high flying politicians come from? What do many journalists study before going to journalism school? It’s the liberal arts broadly defined. In the modern sense the liberal arts is no longer just the traditional subjects of History, Philosophy and Literature (English). It has expanded to include quasi-pseudo-subjects like political science, pseudo-subjects like semiotics and making shit up stuff like gender studies. When people complain that liberal arts gets you a job as a barista, they’re more often referring to the gender studies major than the history major. The latter is usually a bit more intelligent and far less “unconventional” in their personality. read entire article here