College is not trade school. College exists not to generate people who are masters of Framework v3.0, but to generate people who can quickly learn to use whatever tool they're given and who can connect the dots to solve generic problems. Part of that is exposure to a broad range of ideas. Part of that is showing that you can learn about and deliver results on things you're not necessarily excited about.

This is true, but college general education requirements don't fulfill that role. They're classes of 250 people listening to a professor say "write this down because it'll be on the exam". Then the questions on the exam are what the professor said verbatim.

My university didn't allow any classes above the most introductory ones to be considered as fulfilling the general education requirement. I signed up for a history class that would involve doing research and having weekly discussions with a small group. I was stoked. Then the professor made a note that it didn't fulfill the general education requirements. I had to drop it and switch to a huge-ass mindless lecture of hundreds of people. I would've liked to still take the more in-depth history class even if it didn't fit the gen ed requirement, but so many of those BS classes are required that my schedule was completely packed all 4 years with zero leeway.

You can get exceptions. My social science degree had math requirements, but the lowest math class I took was too high level to count for them. I had to fill out a sheet of paper and submit it to the dean, but other than an hour split between talking to my academic advisor, filling out a form, and talking to the dean it wasn't a problem.

I still find it funny and informative that multivariable calculus, linear algebra, and high level math classes did not automatically fulfill the math requirement because no one ever tried to use them to satisfy it.

I feel your pain. What a dumb system.

I don't think college teaches people how to learn, and if they do it's only by accident. There's a body of knowledge on how to teach and how to self educate and it takes a long time for systems to incorporate these knowledge.

Isn't that what high school is for? What's the difference then?

Most of school is primarily baby sitting these days, if were being really real.

That is what high school is, for families where parents want their kids to learn to learn and are well-resourced enough to teach the kids themselves or pay someone to teach.

High school has been dumbed down and is mostly a waste of time.

I wasn't particularly excited to learn philosophy or economics, but that gave me the foundation to understand Marx and Engels. Learning "things you're not necessarily excited about" makes you well-rounded. That's a _good thing_.

Let's use another example. Communicating with other people is a very important part of my job as a software engineer. I'd say that at this point in my career, writing good proposals, documentation, project charters, task orders, change requests, etc. is vital to my individual and collective success, so I'm glad I was taught lots of rhetoric and literature and writing and all that artsy stuff my younger self spent too much time disdaining.

Or another example. I have written precisely zero lines of Lisp or ML for work, and I flunked the first computer science class I took that used Lisp (good old _Essentials of Programming Languages_). And yet I use the concepts I learned in those classes _all the time_. Heck, I was just talking about side effects the other day in the context of 21 CFR Part 11 computer system validation.

My last metaphor. Brushing one's teeth or taking a shower isn't particularly exciting, but that kind of routine maintenance work is a vital part of your physical health. So it goes for mental exercise. Reading something challenging, learning the work's historical context, and writing a critical response well all helps keep you mentally healthy. That's good no matter what socioeconomic system you live in.

It's probably because secondary school has become mostly worthless in the US, so college is taking its place.

Specific citation needed.

At Big US Engineering School, many people are done with their prerequisites in a year.

Unless you're talking about painful core classes like "compiler design" and "networking", which I would say is a different conversation.

Prerequisites are different from core stuff, like say you study computer science but hey take this English class as well for your W credits. I gamed my university on these, taking easy courses that I wouldn’t have bothered with, I think it was one or two quarters of BS (dual acronym meaning) classes.

I used to shit on English class to anyone who would listen, but lately (at age 40) I realize (and grow frustrated at) how poorly most people around me communicate. But then again, I recall my English classes throughout highschool and college and very little time was spent on how to be clear, how to be precise, or how to revise. That definitely wasn't the parameter the curriculum was optimizing for. Sure, there was writing but the grade you got back was simply how much the instructor liked what you had to say.