Instapundit Glenn Harlan Reynolds has an article for The Wall Street Journal about the pressures for change in higher education, particularly as related to runaway costs. He fingers disproportional administrative growth as the primary culprit, with the proverbial "edifice complex" as another problem.
If it ever truly existed, the time when any baccalaureate degree would open doors and produce job offers is long gone. Reynolds mentions students' need to select courses of study which lead to areas of the economy in which hiring actually occurs with some frequency. I believe he doesn't emphasize this issue enough.
The other DrC and I befriended a student who worked at our usual CA supermarket in the deli. He majored in civil engineering and graduated in December at the university from which we both retired. He had two job offers from which to choose as he finished his B.S. degree, and was excited about the one he selected.
Because I favored our graduates getting jobs I paid attention to the firms which came to campus to recruit and the majors in whose students they expressed interest. A short list of those would include, and largely be limited to, engineering, business and accounting, computer science/IT, nursing, and education. Graduates from those programs had a quite good chance of leaving school with a job offer in hand. Others, not so much.
If you have children or grandchildren who are approaching or entering college, you need to help them understand the implications of choice of major. A good first step for any frosh is to ask the campus career placement service which majors are actively recruited. Presuming they want eventually to be employed at a white collar job, taking this recruiting information into account in choosing a major is critical.
