University as Vocational/Technical School: Is This Really Where We Want to Go?

I found much to agree with and about which to become angry in this article in the Washington Post by Georgetown University President Anthony Carnevale. Carnevale is quite right that many higher education students (and their parents) view a university education as an "investment" with an expected economic return in terms of future employability and earnings power. He says that most people go to college, "to get a degree that will help them get a job."Carnevale's statement is probably true on its surface--that is why most people enroll in higher education--but I think the statement sells short the much-maligned liberal arts major, to name one example among many. Somehow, university attendance has evolved into today's "voc-tech" program, analogous in my youth to the schools people attended to learn a "trade" such as plumbing or automobile mechanics, majors that led to immediate employment. This is a shame! If every university re-tools as a 2020's voc-tech analog, our world will be less cognitively rich and too many students' lives intellectually impoverished as a result.My fear is that a relentless pursuit of employability as the desirable outcome of university education will not serve everyone equally well. Ratings of majors of the sort Carnevale proposes will serve some students quite well--those for whom such economic-based guidance is most useful--but will artificially steer others away from would be satisfying majors and successful lives, including employability. Past the first job, more is determined by what one can do than one's major.