Forbes – Harold Sirkin
“First, I want to proffer the observation that the U.S. probably would be much better off – certainly no worse off – if we graduated thousands of fewer lawyers each year and thousands of additional engineers, architects, scientists, industrial designers, and computer geeks. We’re doing better at this. U.S. colleges and universities awarded more than 99,000 undergraduate engineering degrees last year and nearly 52,000 master’s degrees in various engineering fields – up 6% and 4%, respectively, from the previous year. The number of law school graduates, meanwhile, was down 6.5%. These are good trends, but they need to be better. The second point I want to make, which goes back to the Trey Moore conversation, is that our society and education system today are focused on achieving the opposite outcome: pushing our brightest students not only toward college – which is a good thing for most students in most cases – but specifically toward the liberal arts, which, yes, presumably give students “transferable” skills they can use in almost any vocation (such as the ability to write a clear sentence), but prepare many students for graduate school and additional study, not for the world of work . To see where this trajectory can lead, I invite you to read this recent article by journalist Charlotte Allen.”(more)