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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]He's my take on this.  Degrees have long been about class and separation.  It didn't matter so much what the degree was in but that you had one signaled to your potential employer that that you were of a certain class (not so much class of origin because if you had the means and wherewithal to make it through 4 years of study, you belonged in the safe, middle to upper-middle, employable class, especially if your degree was from a recognizable place).

More people are going to college and BA/BS rates will go much higher than 25%, making a college degree not carry the same weight. What will separate out potential applicants - what the degree is in.  [b]If you get a vo-tech degree (business especially) then you will be sorted lower unless you went to the very best schools.  Liberal arts degree will be the marker of a certain class that employers will look for - someone with the means to study the liberal arts.[/b]  Add to that that liberal arts so teach critical analysis and writing skills (I promise that the graduates in history and English at my college do WAY more and WAY better writing than our business graduates), and liberal arts majors will be more employable and will make more money in the future.  Even now salary studies show that while they start lower their life-time earnings rise above those with more practical degrees.

Education is about class and always has been.[/quote]

Well, I was with you until the bolded part.  I think the SLAC (and I attended one) are dinosaurs.  At the time we all went it was affordable.  My student loans were minimal.  There was not much competition from my classmates to get into the great schools.  I probably got some preferential treatment along the way as a woman but was always top in my class.  Now i agree with those who say that the SLAC bubble will burst.  The only reason it hasn't burst is due to the international students willing to pay full freight.  The SLAC's are doing everything they can to jigger the numbers for Forbes, U.S. News & world report, so charge more in order to spend more on marketing in order to increase applicant class size just so they can reject them to make their employee (the SLAC) looks more selective.  This all will crumble someday.  In the meantime, it is not the Voc. ed classes/training as you call them that are becoming the hot sellers.  It is the computer scientist, the reservoir engineer, the technology wiz, the other STEM specialists who are getting into grad programs and making big bucks.  My SLAC is simply not worth $65,000 K a year but four years of Chinese, Arabian, Portuguese and in-demand sophisticated computer science or aerospace engineering at a VA in-state school with grad school to follow is a way to get both the traditional liberal arts coursework (required even at VA Tech and all other VA universities to the vest of my knowledge) while also acquiring a talent that is marketable in the workplace.  All my SLAC did for me was get me into Yale Law.  And now I am telling kids not to go into law.
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