When I was in school, we Engineering majors were derided as unimaginative losers who were only motivated by future earning potential.
To which we responded, “And your point is...?”
Why would anybody go to school for any other reason than to get a better job someday?
Is that a joke?
How about to become a better citizen, Christian, spouse, or parents, improve one's mind and soul? Do you really believe that a homemaker (for instance) has no need or use for education?
A proper college education should be far more than a technical school. Not that there's anything wrong with technical schools, for their purpose.
As for the corporations, the reason they demand college degrees, as we wrote in 2007, is that the government forbids them to screen applicants directly for basic intelligence under a doctrine of antidiscrimination law known as "disparate impact" that the U.S. Supreme Court established in the 1971 case Griggs v. Duke Power Co.: But why are employers able to get away with requiring a degree without running afoul of Griggs? Because colleges and universities--again, especially elite ones--go out of their way to discriminate in favor of minorities. By admitting blacks and Hispanics with much lower SAT scores than their white and Asian classmates, purportedly in order to promote "diversity," these institutions launder the exam of its disparity. Thus the higher-education industry and corporate employers have formed a symbiotic relationship in which the former profits by acting as the latter's gatekeeper and shield against civil-rights lawsuits. Little wonder that in 2003, when the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of discriminatory admissions policies at the University of Michigan, 65 Fortune 500 companies filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging that they be upheld. Now of course the kids at Occupy Wall Street don't know any of this. They have received four-plus years of "education" from mostly left-wing professors who owe their sinecures to this arrangement and who are happy, for reasons of both ideology and self-interest, to vilify the capitalist system they feed off. When we explained this to Taylor, it was totally new to him, and he was fascinated.
If these young people ever figure out the real reasons they're so deeply in debt, maybe they'll "occupy" Columbia and NYU rather than Wall Street.