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Message: [QUOTE="nelsonmuntz, post: 4277780, member: 833"] I am not so sure about your last sentence. One of the issues with student debt is kids borrowing mountains of money to get worthless degrees. I don't know if I would recommend a kid borrow $300k to get an engineering or CS degree from MIT or Carnegie Mellon undergrad, but it is at least worth a discussion. I would strongly recommend AGAINST a kid borrowing that much money to get a literature degree from an NESCAC school. A kid can read literature on their own time, they don't need to pay someone $75k a year to teach it to them. It is interesting how powerful the traditional liberal arts schools are in framing the debate on the value of higher education. Calling STEM or business schools "trade" or "vocational" programs harkens back to a different era where the kids (mostly sons) of the wealthy and upper middle class met kids from similar families before heading out to jobs secured by family connections. That world started to end in the late 70's, and it is mostly dead today. Yet the liberal arts schools keep using that language to justify their entire business model, which by any objective measure is failing. The publics aren't much better off. As someone else pointed out, the class sizes in the humanities at public schools is similar to that at the expensive privates, because kids do not want to take those classes any more. The problem is that the humanities departments are staffed as if it is 1995, with a lot of aging, tenured faculty that do not have many students to teach, while 100+ kids are packed into an engineering lecture hall. [/QUOTE]

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