I just saw the stats on this. Humanities majors are falling behind their cohorts in the job market. Understand, I despise the effort, mostly from the Right, to make college into job training. However, you're either "privileged" or delusional if you argue that job prospects should not be a variable in making the decision about a major or even going to college. Telling prospective college students who consider entering the humanities or social sciences, "Do your work, graduate, and you'll be fine" is irresponsible. Statistically, a whole lot of those people will not be fine. Many will end up working low-paying jobs after emerging from college, sometimes working alongside people in the same or similar positions, who never attended college, without the debt of the college graduates. This can't be repeated enough: the smart, ambitious college graduates would outpace most of their peers, even if they had never attended college. It's great that they attended college, but then assuming that most of the rest would also be best served in attending four-year colleges does not follow.

And here's the other thing to consider: if college is about education and producing better, informed citizens, are our universities doing that, in general? I think it's clear that they are not generally doing that. The level of ignorance, some of which is measured, is astounding for students who spent five years at institutions of higher learning. And the levels of apathy are similarly astounding. Millennials, for all the big talk, ended up being mostly no-shows at the ballot box and pale in comparison even to their parents' generation in terms of civic engagement.

It would be one thing if we saw college students graduating and demonstrating that they received fine educations. That's not what's happening. And for some of them, and this will sound hyperbolic, but they've emerged dumber than when they arrived, if they've had the misfortune to be re-educated into the dopey grievance belief system that permeates public universities and elite private universities, from the administrative level down. Four-year degrees are the most overrated product in the US, right now.