Reply #30: Back during my teaching career, I met a nurse

[Lydia Leftcoast]

who had come back to school to get a degree in English. She felt that her college education had been too vocationally oriented, and she felt "trained," not educated.

One college I applied to offered what it called "upside down degrees." It gave B.A.'s to people who already had some sort of vocational training from community colleges and gave them four-year degrees upon completion of a set of liberal arts courses.

Not everyone is going to college to get a job. Back in the 1960s, it was considered normal not to think about job prospects until you were a senior. Of course, in those days, companies were willing to take liberal arts majors and train them instead inspecting them to come straight from college with a complete set of business skills.

The transition occurred gradually throughout the 1970s. According to the program of my B.A. ceremonies, only three students in a class of 250 majored in business. When I came back as a visiting instructor ten years later, 1/2 of all students were majoring in business.