I largely want to echo @Rivet2000’s view. US public schools don’t do a great job and, frankly, I don’t know how well the private schools do. So, colleges and universities need to do some catch-up work compared to schools in the UK. (I attended public school in the US except for one year in a private school (in the US sense) in Oxford, UK, which was spectacularly better than what I experienced in the US. I have a STEM BA, MS and PhD from top US universities and began my career as a professor at one of these schools.) I can’t say that I loved all of the courses I had to take to meet my distribution requirements, but on balance, the broadening effect was really helpful. Some of that could have been accomplished by a better HS education (e.g., literature courses and language courses – could metaphysics have been done well in HS?) but others probably required a university setting (courses in psychology and political science with folks who helped create parts of their fields)
More generally, going straight into a major seems a little misguided in the modern world. I did not study economics, anthropology, psychology or international relations in high school. I taught myself to code back in the dark ages but otherwise would not have had any idea about computer science. I’m not sure how I would have known that I wanted to apply to major in any of those prior to college.
Focusing education solely on preparing for jobs is also tricky. I have had two jobs for the bulk of my working life. Neither job existed when I was in college. One didn’t exist due to lack of computing power. The second job I helped create through my work in my initial job (which was as a business school professor), though now there are firms and people with this job. My conclusion from my experience (and much else) is that one needs to go to university to learn to think in a variety of different ways (as an economist, as a cognitive psychologist, as an evolutionary biologist, as a physicist, as a statistician, as a philosopher, etc.). As one approaches challenges, one can then put on the appropriate hats to figure out how to best address the challenges. I would advise against going to school to prepare for a job per se (e.g., accounting) as I think many of those jobs will cease to exist within the student’s lifetime and new ones that require intellectual dexterity will arise.
ShawD started university in Canada. There the system is more like the UK. At McGill, undergraduate is three years (I think freshman year is largely done in CEGEP, which I think is like junior college for Grade 12 and First Year of University). At the others, one applied into an area (sciences, humanities, nursing, kinesiology, …) and one chooses one’s major at the end of the first year. I remember touring Canadian schools with ShawD. One high school senior was applying in kinesiology. I frankly was stunned that a high school senior had enough knowledge to choose such a specific field as a major.
So, while I think the US universities have to play catch-up and don’t always do a good job of creating distribution requirements that actually help people develop additional ways of thinking (not clear I’d be happy with cooking classes for my kids), the need to broaden beyond one’s major into areas one does not know about addresses a need that is going to increase as technology gobbles up ever larger swaths of white collar jobs. Not to mention what I suspect is an increasing need to cross disciplinary boundaries.
I’m a little more distant from academia (my years of being a full-time professor are in the distant rear-view mirror although I have an academic appointment and teach in executive courses each year) but my impression is that US graduate academic and professional (e.g., business and public policy) education was where the US educational system generally caught up and passed UK and European schools. Even there, the US system would likely have an initial year or two of very rigorous foundational courses that UK universities would see as repetitious of undergraduate courses.