I’ve never head of an undergraduate major in Gothic Architecture, but I’ll play along. In your example the undergraduate education obviously doesn’t matter for the person’s job performance. To take a real discipline I’m more familiar with, a number of business titans like George Soros (investor and hedge fund manager) and Peter Thiel (venture capitalist/tech entrepreneur) studied philosophy as undergrads. Their philosophy training has no obvious relevance to their eventual careers, except perhaps insofar as it honed their critical thinking skills, taught them to challenge conventional assumptions, etc. But on those scores they’re likely better off than the auto-didact.
And there are also many philosophy grads for whom rigorous training in philosophy does have relevance to job performance, even though they’re not professional philosophers. Examples would be Stephen Breyer (Supreme Court Justice) and John Paul II (Vicar of Christ). The same is true for many other humanities and social science majors. Of the current Supreme Court Justices, 4 studied government/political science, 3 history, 1 philosophy, and 1 English. I’m not enamored of the present composition of the Court, but in general I think it’s healthy to have all those disciplinary perspectives represented on the nation’s highest court. And the same goes for many other public service positions.
The work of Randall Collins helps to complete my thought on Anthony Carnevale’s comment. They also tend to agree with @bluebayou and @foobar1. Here are two excerpts:
The dirty secret in the article title is Collins’ observation that credential inflation keeps universities flush with tuition dollars, which help to finance the livelihoods of senior faculty such as himself. “Most intellectuals in liberal society, we take it pretty much as an article of faith that we need to expand education,” he says. “It’s also for us a rather self-serving argument. It provides our positions.”
and,
*Collins’ book, The Credential Society (1979), cited historic precedent and the theories of Max Weber to argue that the spiral of credential requirements for white-collar work in America has been driven by the natural desire of an educated elite to preserve the best occupations in society for their offspring.
*
“There are not too many schools where ABET-accredited engineering programs have only 10% in humanities and social studies general education requirements (Brown requires 13%). Or are you saying that you paid less attention to your humanities and social studies courses, spending only 10% of your time on them even though they were 15-25% of the course work you took?”
Agree, it’s typically one course out of 5 so 20% in a semester based college, which is right in the middle of the 15-25% window you cited. The question I think is whether to consider the non-engineering courses in math and science as part of pre-professional or not.
Depends on whether you consider those math and science courses to be pre-professional in the context of students of any major taking them.
Remember also that many students choose liberal arts majors for pre-professional reasons (e.g. math, statistics, or economics for finance/actuarial goals, or the somewhat mistaken belief that one has to study political science or English for pre-law purposes or biology for pre-med purposes) or take various kinds of liberal arts courses for pre-professional goals (e.g. pre-meds taking biology, chemistry, physics, and math courses).
@prof2dad Although I focused on Anderson’s second point because it dovetails nicely with Carnevale, my preferred strategy is actually his first bullet point. I can not believe that 12 years of schooling is still insufficient to give a student enough skills to learn on his own, outside of his area of specialization. So, I advised mine to go directly into a pre-professional business program, and their performance, relative to their classmates, will ultimately decide where they fit in the grand scheme of things. Collins should be proud.
@tangentline If high schools make STEM exams so easy that plugging in the numbers would get a student an A, they are not preparing them for college level STEM study. Perhaps that explains why 40 to 60% of students switch out of STEM or not completing their degree at all? Dishonest grading is not helpful to anyone.
I know someone who got a PHD in French history with a specialization in the 1832 revolution (think Les Misérables). After not being able to find a suitable academic job, he got hired by a French bank, and has done very well for himself in finance.