My professors defined sociology as the painful elaboration of the obvious and psychology [as] the painstaking study of human behavior by people who need to be studied.
As Mike Rowe pointed out recently, "Nothing has gotten more expensive in the last 40 years than a 4-year degree. Not real estate, not healthcare, not energy, nothing.” Indeed, it now costs around $90,000 a year to attend a private college.
And it is not just the exclusive schools that charge nose-bleed prices. Columbia University costs $93,000 a year, including tuition, housing, and books. Landmark College, a tiny, obscure Vermont school, is almost as expensive. The total cost of attending Landmark for one year is $86,000.
Is a college degree worth a quarter of a million dollars? No, of course not. And though a case can be made that an undergraduate degree in accounting or business will eventually pay off, no one can defend the insane cost of obtaining a liberal arts degree at a private school.
Columbia, for example, a university riddled with anti-Semitic racism, offers degrees in sociology, gender studies, and Yiddish studies. What kind of job will a Columbia grad be qualified to fill with a degree in those fields?
Colleges across America fund degree programs in the humanities, liberal arts, and social sciences that don't give graduates useful job skills. Why aren't these programs closed down?
Two reasons. First, universities continue to offer degrees in these fields because they have tenured professors who staff liberal arts departments who are very difficult to fire.
Second, hundreds of private colleges define themselves as liberal arts colleges. It would be tough for these schools to justify their existence if they scrapped their liberal arts majors.
In my view, colleges that charge outrageous tuition prices that force students to take out loans to obtain low-value degrees are engaging in fraud. College students are beginning to figure that out, and that's why enrollment in liberal arts programs is declining.