Is A "Well-Rounded" Education a Good One? 741
"In my Finance course, I learn how to balance a corporate stock portfolio, but I have no clue how to start a business or pay my employees.
In my System Analysis & Design course, I spend 3 hours constructing data-flow diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, and Ghantt charts for programs that take around an hour to code!
In my Management course, my professor discusses techniques for being an effective CEO, but I don't even know how to manage a few subordinates, much less an entire company.
In my MIS course, we learn about client-server technology, but when I ask if my peers have tested their web pages on Macintosh, they reply, "Why would I have to do that?" Most of them don't even think of Linux as an operating system, but more as a hacker's toy. Forget about asking them to make it Mozilla or Lynx compatible. They don't want to waste their
time. But the University will make sure it is ADA
compliant, since any institution that receives federal funding must require this...
Don't most "big picture" lessons come with experience, through person's journey from entry-level employee to a skilled IT/business professional? Wouldn't it make more sense to teach things that will help students early in their careers, like technical skills and other trade/foundation skills that are often required of entry-level, non-management employees? Does the average entry-level IT person need to make the sort of decisions a CEO or CIO needs to make? Do companies really want me to spend more time diagramming a program than I need to program it in the first
place? (What about just documenting the code?) Knowing the big picture is good, but how do you get to that level if you don't have any skills?
My question for Slashdot readers is: Is this really what companies want of today's graduates?"
A course that I wish had been available (Score:4, Interesting)
Universities could do a lot to help new graduates entering the workforce. Since jobs today are far from employment for life, those skills would prove useful a number of times.
A well rounded education is good because... (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe in the General Education requirements. Why? Because everyone that graduates from a University should have some basic skills that can help them regardless of their profession of choice. People wanting to go into non-computer related professions should still have a vauge idea of how to use a computer. People going into computer related fields should be able to appreciate literature. Everyone in every type of profession should be able to preform some of the same basic skills.
Not only does this allow any college graduate to be able to converse intelegently about any subject, but it allows people the ability to change jobs in the future without going back to school. Because prospective employers know that any college graduate has basic skills, there is potential for starting level jobs in fields unrelated to one's degree. Without general education requirements, none of this is possible.
We all should, upon graduating from college, know the basic facts about everything. Once we know the basics, we have the foundation to learn whatever our heart desires in the future. Without general education requirements, people graduating in a given field will know more about that field from the start, but the cost is the lack of the basic knowledge of other fields, which provides for a very narrow minded person.
No. (Score:4, Interesting)
Ignoring the basics... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the problem is his class was too "applied" and ignored the basics. He wasn't taught anything about the history of computing, use the words "Babbage", "Turing", "Shockley", etc., and they draw a blank stare. For him, computers just emerged from thin air. He doesn't know how a transitor works. Thus, when it comes time to explain anything to him, changes in the industry, how it may impact his business, he just doesn't have the background. However, he does know how to print "Hello World" ten times. How practical.
In the other end of the spectrum, I was not encouraged to dig mightly into English and History. Both of which I've had to play "catch-up" due to years of neglect. In high school we completely ignore Contract Law, instead we focus Business class on investing and accounting. Admittedly, both of these can be useful, however my high-school business class ('87) completely left out contract law. What is business *but* contract law? I've signed many more contracts than I've had dollars to invest or accounting books to balance.
Also, they should renew the focus on civics. I recently found out that the same friend of mine didn't have a civics class. He has never read the constitution nor had a discussion of its importance beyond "US is great, we are a free country." Admittedly, I goofed off in my civics class but I do remember the day we talked about the constitution. And on Sept 11, I recalled a very long, detailed class discussion about our foreign policy. Helpful it was. History of Politics is very useful indeed.
"well rounded education" (Score:1, Interesting)
"they" do not want us to be drones, so focused into one interest that we lose the abilities to interact with one another.
"they" want us to have multiple interests, so we can be "well rounded adults."
this does tend to cause problems, that universities are not eqipped to fix.
no matter what you go to school for, regardless of where you end up working, you will not be fully prepared. every business is different, even like businesses have different communities and different idealogies that no school could ever prepare someone for. (think office politics)
this could explain the rise in the number of technical schools. things like specific training, lifetime job placement, small class size and others are very attractive to prospective students.
is this the best way? for some.
for me? no.
but this is America, and we have a choice!
Looking back... (Score:2, Interesting)
Many of the technical details one learns in college are quickly outdated, and only serve the first few years of a career. After that, you must learn on your own what you need to keep ahead at work. Good, insightful courses in how our civilizations work, though, and how we live and think, are seen as highly valuable many years later.
Re:No. (Score:5, Interesting)
Universities are *certifying* bodies that grant you a certificate once you have demonstrated a particular level of intellectual maturity. The whole point of a University is to expose you to ideas that you would not otherwise expose yourself to. Those ideas that you are exposed to is what your employer is paying for -- they are paying for critical thinking.
That being said, you should stop poo-pooing your American History papers and dig into the Federalist Papers. There is alot of ideas packed in there about how to run organizations and talk of the human condition. These topics are valueable. As well as the discusion techniques you learn in class and dealing with other classmates. Hamilton, Jay, and Madison are serious thinkers. You can learn alot from them.
Preventing ignorance is more important than traini (Score:4, Interesting)
The entry-level IT person needs to understand the decisions a CEO or CIO makes.
Young people are a pain in the neck because they are not well-rounded. They come into companies thinking they have all the answers, but they don't understand what all the questions are. BTW, I'm describing myself here - I would not hire the person I was at 22.
Take the example you mention. What happens when management wants to only invest in creating content for Internet Explorer on Windows? A typical kid out of school will fight for making it work on Macintoshes, Mozilla on Linux, and possibly Lynx. The kid thinks management doesn't understand the Big Picture, but the reverse is true. It is the kid that doesn't understand all the data that management is using to make their decision. Another example is Linux within IT. There are Big Picture issues why management is afraid of using it.
Note that when I ran my own business (which eventually grew to 100 people in size), I made sure that our webpages worked on Lynx (Opera, HotJava, etc.) and I our poor little 486 running RedHat 5.2 handled huge volumes of e-mail. However, I also understand the big picture - I know why the decisions I made here do not apply to others. (The company has been bought out, we are using MS Exchange e-mail, which I find loathsome, but I don't dispute the decision, because I understand the big-picture).
>Do companies really want me to spend more time diagramming a program than I need to program it in the first place?
Yes. This is exactly the point. The company doesn't care about the code you right, they only care about whether others can fix bugs or make enhancements to your code 5 years from now. The "design" of the code is far more important than the implementation. It is actually far more complicated than that (heck, I've watched company's so afraid of actual coding that they get into design-paralysis, but that's a different issue). The point is simply that what your employer wants out of you is often different from what you want to do - that's why they pay you.
>My question for Slashdot readers is: Is this really what companies want of today's graduates?"
First, as an employer, I want somebody who will do what I want them to do. If that means writing content only for Internet Explorer, then so be it. Second, I want them to understand what is valuable to me. If I want Internet Explorer specific content, I don't want them to meekly submit and do it, I want them to understand why it is important to me. Fresh perspectives that youth tends to have are indeed valuable, but only when they can fit within my existing framework.
Finally, there is the general question of being "well-rounded". This is indeed the definition of a "university": its goal is not to educate you so much as prevent you from being ignorant. It depends upon your values. Some people find that ignorance is bliss. Do you want to be a raving ignorant paranoid (*cough* JonKatz *cough*) that thinks they always have the right answers? Or do you want to be somebody who knows enough of the Big Picture that never has all the answers?
Re:Teach Thinking! start early! (Score:2, Interesting)
it doesn't seem to me that the public school system has really advanced much in the past century or two, given the animosity occasionally demonstrated towards free thought as well as the strong disciplinarian atmosphere that seems to pervade schools.
in some ways, public education (i mean k-12) seems to have drastically deteriorated, as in an 8th grade final from 1895 [goodschools.com].
Re:Teach Thinking! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm just starting med school now and we've had a couple of exams. I'm in class with some of the brightest minds of America. You would think that my class would have similar types of minds, because we all had to go through the same screening process, but we all perform differently on different types of exams.
I'm not so good at brute force memorization. It takes me much longer than my collegues to study for a biochem exam and i only do average on them. Yet I can rock the molecular bio exam with little studying because it's based on applied knowledge.
Thinking is very different for different people. It develops at an early age (thank you parents for pushing me) but takes years to develop. i didn't learn how to think for myself until i got to high school. I felt I was behind my classmates until I learned how to do applied knowledge very well. I suppose when others were memorizing, I was using connecting schematics.
To answer my first question, I would probably go about it through a "well-rounded" education. If I hadn't majored in philosophy as an undergraduate, I'm sure I wouldn't have been good at applied knowledge skills. If I had taken more classes where memorization plays a big role, then maybe I would have been better at that. As of right now, I'm the only one in my class that cannot remember more than 20% of the names of our classmates.
Re:A well rounded education is good because... (Score:5, Interesting)
Students focus on a specific field of study (hopefully) because they are interested in that field. If you ask a history major to take physics or a physicist to take history, the student will likely be uninterested in the course and probably will take almost nothing away from the course.
What is lacking is breadth in the context of the student's field of interest. If you want a physicist to take something from history, the course needs to be taught from the perspective of a physicist: How has science influenced historical developments at various times in various places? The course can be taught with the expectation that the student has a high level of knowledge about science and the focus allows the student to see why history is important as the student can see how they may play a larger role.
Not only does the student learn some facts (which are actually irrelevant - we learn facts as we need to learn facts) but gains an appreciation of why a broad education is important and can see more directly how it is relevant. That appreciation leads to lifelong learning, which is really the ultimate goal of a college education.
It's called "Professional Development". (Score:4, Interesting)
A class is basically an expensive cliff's notes for something you're going to need in real life. There's no better way to pick it up than hands-on experience, and no - repeat- NO- class can do that for you. Let me address these proposed course points of yours from my personal experience:
Resume Writing: the ProDev class sucked for this, being incredibly basic. How did I get a decent resume? Simple- when work was slowing down at my current job, my boss told me "make up your resume and let me see it." So I did. He shot down about half of it and suggested changes. I made them. Repeat until he was happy with it- THEN he told me to run it by the assistant chair of Education, who has a Masters in English. He had a few suggestions. By the time I passed the gauntlet, my Resume rocked the casbah.
Researching Companies and Potential Employers: I've never had to do this, actually- it's been calls out of the blue, or emails from friends saying "hey, this guy's looking for...." since day one. This is a good thing- I live in Pittsburgh, and none of the local companies look like anything I'd want to work for. I'm happy where I'm at.
Interviewing Skills: This is the essence of social engineering. If you don't convince the interviewer that you're a guy who not only does the job well, but can get along with him, you should be fine. If you click, you're almost guranteed in. If you're not laid back and congenial, and don't have some social skills, forget it. I have friends that are a hell of a lot better at various aspects of what I do, but they couldn't talk a rock into sitting still.
Networking: What it ALL boils down to. No one ever got a job without knowing somebody- unless the case is 100% pure "we need somebody NOW." Case in point- my first supervisor at my job was a guy like that. I got in because he knew me. My next supervisor got in because he knew him (both of these guys left), and a future coworker is getting in by virtue of strong recommendations from myself and my last supervisor. That's three people getting jobs because they knew one guy that was in the right place at the right time.
I was barely competent when I got in- I was the only guy this person knew - and that everyone he asked knew- who could do the job. I picked up the details as I went along, and forget nascent capabilities into actual skills. Having friends in good places can only get you so far- your actual skills are going to carry you the rest of the way. So it's not enough to have a lot of friends OR be amazingly good at what you're doing- you gotta have BOTH, or you're going to be having a hell of a time of it.
That's my experience- which I'm slowly melding into a collection of essays with intent to stick on a website when I have enough of them.
If you have questions, replace AT with @ and ask away.
Re:A directed education (Score:2, Interesting)
The last time I checked, "well-rounded" meant, if you were focusing on science:
1. Taking one intro science course not in your major
2. Taking 2 or 3 "humanities"
3. Taking 2 or 3 "social studies"
Adds up to a semester and a half, not all that much since it's a course per semester over your education.
And yes, you do learn important things, assuming you pay attention.
Like when if an artist makes it look remotely like a penis, it almost always is a penis, especially in advertisement.
That attacking a loved thing makes you hated (known, but Burger King suffered for years because they kept attacking McDonald's.) Remember this the next time you argue politics.
That historically, one nation's god was the next nation over's devil.
That racism as a basis for slavery is a relatively recent concoction used to justify continued slavery after Western thought otherwise got rid of it (and not the Bible, sorry, bzzzt. Guess again. God doesn't care if you have slaves.) Historically, if your village or city-state lost a war, sorry, Charlie, if you were still alive after that, you were a slave.
That people will build up an emotional investment in their beliefs, and that the greater the investment, the more anger they have when their beliefs are questioned, especially if their beliefs are eviscerated logically. This forms the basis for problems discussing religion and politics.
Nah, let's all just study technical things so we can be Heinlein's "brain bugs" in Starship Troopers, doing technical work for our liberal arts lawyer masters, abso-fucking-lutely oblivious to manipulations around us.
Re:A course that I wish had been available (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree with the other poster who said that university is not a trade school. But at the same time, there should be some assistance with making the transition from the academic to the working world.
This is an ancient debate (Score:3, Interesting)
Look back, some 17 years later, the decision to teach theory was correct. You can always learn the specifics of XYZ OS, or the syntax of language ABC. But learning why they work the way they do is much more important.
Scott Neugroschl
-- Founding Member of CISSA, UCSC Crown College 1984
St. John's College (Score:2, Interesting)
This produces an individual who is a Liberal Artist in the original sense - one who is qualified to apply a disciplined reason to any subject and arrive at innovative conclusions.
On the surface, it may not seem like much use to a person who wants to be in IT - there aren't any programming courses, management fads, or courses on building robots or designing digital circuits - but the substance of the courses gives a rock solid foundation to the intellect whch the canned courses of a departmentalized university training institutes lack.
What is there is the basic sparks of every issue in contemporary life - what is life, what separates man from beast, what is number, how is information moved between minds, how did the scientific knowledge we take for granted - geometry, arithmetic, algebra, calculus, astronomy, chemistry, biology, physics, electricity, sound, and sight - come to be, and how little has changed in centuries. The ethical struggles of man are the same now as they were for those who have come before us, and they have good answers to many of them. The sciences have made remarkable strides in the last 60 years, but it is predicated on, and forshadowed by, the work of centuries . Knowing how and why things ended up as they did can give us a warning sign when we go off towards the cliff, show us the dark spots on the map that need to be explored, and remind us of fascinating subjects that had to be left unexplored because the tools were insufficient for the task. All that makes much more "well-rounded" individuals asfter four years of formal study than any program filled with HOW-TOs and formulas.
Re:A human being should be able to... (Score:1, Interesting)
Specialization is for insects.
- Robert A. Heinlein
This happens to be one of my favorite quotes, simply because most of these skills require the ability to learn (and the rest require empathy). Depending on your interpretation, 50 to 60 percent of the skills on the list cannot be learned in a classroom but in real life.
I graduated 6 years ago with a degree that I have not used to get a job yet and no idea of what I was going to do. Three years ago I got a computer job and I've been teaching myself since. That wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't also graduted with the ability to learn on my own; as I expect many Slashdot readers have.
Unfortunatey, that ability to learn didn't really come from the (US) school system, though the better teachers that I had helped develope it. Part of the concept of the broad spectrum of classes in education is to help develope the critical thinking skills and the ability to learn, but too many teachers and professors forget (or never understood) that concept. Harking back to the Heinlein quote, education of yourself is one of those areas where you have to act alone.
The myth of College (Score:2, Interesting)
Myth 1: Universities are taught by teachers.
Reality: In some schools, high school substitute teachers are required to take more education training than university professors. Professors are appointed to their positions because of their status in the field or because of their research and development, not because of their ability to teach. You are being taught by experts in the field, but not necessarily those that can teach or even care to do so.
Myth 2: Universities want you to be well-rounded.
Reality: Universities want you to have to take classes in departments that would otherwise dry up and die if people chose what they wanted as ciriculum. Maybe at one point being "well-rounded" was a priority. But right now, there are departments that if they relied solely on internal support, they would disappear.
I got my 4-year degree in Philosophy, and spent some graduate time in Philosophy as well. The department had 2 dozen graduate students, most on assistantship. The only way that Philosophy could keep its head above water was that two courses of theirs were essentially manditory if you did not want to take calculus. English, music, theater, and sports flocked to logic class because the alternative was derivatives and integrals. It was well known within the department that if the logic class was dropped as a manditory elective, hardly anyone would take it, and the Phil dept would disappear thru lack of funding.
Let's face it, there are some classes that you took that you would never have taken on your own that were a waste of time. There were probably others that you later enjoyed taking. But considering that adding on those electives can add 1-2 YEARS onto your course of study without them, and at $15,000 a year, that's a lot of money to spend on the possibility that some unconsidered course will be worthwhile. Why do you think that a bachelors takes four years, but a masters takes only two? Course padding.
If you doubt me, take a look at your core classes outside of your department. Chances are that those classes were in departments that don't do well on their own (don't have a large number of students). How many law classes did you have to take, or sports, or business perhaps? Those departments are well funded and don't want to be bothered with teaching core classes.
Myth 3: Well-rounded ciriculum exposes the student to different fields of study.
Reality: Often the "core" classes that are required have low standards and are not good introductions at all. Core classes are frequently taught by the adjunct faculty, grad students, or the "new" professors simply because no one else in the department wants to do it. Sometimes it is simply the professor's "turn" to teach that class. They draw the short straw, if you will. Such classes are usually very large because of its required nature. Those instructors are usually under a lot of pressure to pass students, especially sports players, so the class can become rather dumbed down. Some core classes are nothing more than student mills trying to get the most students thru as possible, so that the department can get it's funding.
That's all for now. I have to go get on another soapbox. Some of you will disagree with me, but I think if you privately asked some of your faculty what would happen if core classes were not enforced, some would says that they would lose their jobs.
International Baccalaureate to the Rescue (Score:1, Interesting)
The obvious effect is that by the time we enter college, an IB student is founded thoroughly in at least two languages, at least two branches of the sciences, the arts, the theory of wisdom and knowledge, classical philosophy, and has a mastery of Calculus-level mathematics.
The important effect, though, is that we are prepared to become members of the international community. This is a significant concept, especially today. People who are capable of doing their job and only their job are legion. What is needed are people who bind world cultures together, people who can influence the course of humanity. People who can think.
This is what a broad education is meant to provide. I must agree with what was said earlier: Universities are not technical schools or job-training academies. They exist to embrace students' minds', pull them out of the box, and, to use a cliché, expand their horizons.
I suppose one simply must ask him/herself: "Do I want to learn an occupation, or do I want an education?" If it's the former, investigate technical programs and technical schools. If it's the latter, look towards the university system.
Maybe the U.S. should learn from Germany (which, as a note, is the foreign country that I'm in my fourth year of studying) and their education system. Those who want to learn to weld metals aren't forced through philosophy and Latin classics. Instead they are identified and moved to schools to learn the jobs they want to perform. Those who want to be photographers learn the arts, physics and mathematics used therein and finish their education apprenticing with a photographer. Those who want to learn the theory of knoweldge are the ones who eventually take the Arbitur and go on to a prestegious Universität. Everybody wins.
The 1950s idea of a college education (Score:2, Interesting)
The discussion came to programming and he passed out an article from some respected magazine about programmers coming from different liberal arts backgrounds. He then proceeded to ask the class what do you expect out of a college education. I raised my hand and told the 130+ in the class that I expected to be trained to get a really good job and everything over that was gravy. Startled by my commentary he began to relate the virtues of getting a college education and I agreed with him except for one point.
The whole idea of college 50 years ago was to expand your horizons and try different things, maybe even as little as 25 years ago actually. Now, try to get a professional job outside of sales without a college education; it can't be done. To me it has become another requirement of a job. My grandfather never finished high school and was the manager of a number of Levins stores starting in 1955. You can't get a job managing a McDonald's without a college education anymore.
So excuse while I burst everyone's bubble about well-roundness. I think there is something for being well versed in other cultures, knowing whats going in the world, the ability to speak and write well, and knowing how to manage others. However, well-roundness is just another word for employable so don't use it to cram classes that dont contribute to that goal into my schedule (not mine specifically because I'm graduated: metaphorical my schedule =) )
Re:Preventing ignorance is more important than tra (Score:3, Interesting)
This is indeed the definition of a "university": its goal is not to educate you so much as prevent you from being ignorant.
The purpose of education is a very old debate and the term "well-rounded" is a much watered-down version of the a principle defended by Cicero (106 - 43 B.C) that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is a defining human characteristic.
In contrast, Cato the Elder (234 - 149 BC) insisted that knowledge be judged by what it produce and held what might now be called a liberal education in contempt.
The definitive exposition of the issue is Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University [newmanreader.org]. He makes a useful distinction between "servile" education ("mechanical employment, and the like, in which the mind has little or no part") as being the opposite of "liberal" education, which "is the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence."
Newman does not disparage the professions as being devoid of intellectual value. However, one can see in his distinction between the two types of education that putting one's mind purely in the service of earning a living ignores a much larger world beyond one's immediate needs.
Newman argues: "Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentlemen, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life;--these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a University."
You're thinking like an uneducated person. (Score:2, Interesting)
What about those who have already learned to love education before they get to college? What about those who do not attend college for financial reasons? What about those who went to college for a few years, figured out that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and left without a degree?
On the opposite side, a college degree has much in common with the much bally-hooed "paper certs". Many 4 year degrees are simply the beginning of a journey, but many of the people who get their degree are so proud of their accomplishment that they fail to realize this is not the end of their learning experience. I have attended many college ceremonies where their validictorian or president will start off a speach by saying, "Well, we finally made it guys!"
Although I do not doubt their ability to regurgitate the knowledge that they learned over the past 4-5-6-7-8 years, they over-estimate the value of their degree in the same way that many over-estimate the value of their IT cert. In fact, I applaud the graduates who are "in absentia", because they understand how unimportant their accomplishment is. Yes, its a wonderful accomplishment, but the ceremony itself is dumbed down to just a bunch of friends and relatives who want to let them know how smart they are.
So what should a university aim to produce? Simple. They should strive to have every person who graduates with a college degree DESIRE to learn even more. A university who has graduates which claim, "I'm so glad I'm done. I don't want to read another book in my entire life!", should never have passed.
This is what a university should aim to produce... the thirst for knowledge.
And now for something completely different........ (Score:2, Interesting)
In my own case, which was an MSc in Biology, the course structure gave a good mix of structured teaching of basic skills as well as some time to do the courses you find interesting.
There are a couple of major differences in the way a university degree in Denmark is set up (using examples from my own degree here, i'm sure there's also local variation in Denmark). The first two years of my course was laid out before I arrived at university, with no choice of courses. Instead you were trained in the various fields in biology, having a semester in each "major" field of biology. Alongside the biology teaching, each semester also included courses in either chemistry, math or statistics (all planned out).
For the follwing two years (years 3+4) you were completely free to pick courses on your own, take semesters at other universities etc. Merits can be transferred quite easily, so i found myself doing 6 months of courses in Norway without prolonging my study time. The idea about choosing courses in year 3+4 rather than straight away is to give you some ballast in your choices. After two years of making acquaintances with all the fields, you had an idea about where you wanted to go with it.
Finally the last (fifth) year consist entirely of writing your MSc as a research project, not doing any courses, which gives you a good idea about life in research and whether continuing to a PhD is a good idea for you.
All in all, I find that the Danish university education structure does provide a very sound background and set of key skills for your chosen profession.
Although i'm certain that the education helps you obtain some key skills, once you're in a work place, you find yourself learning a lot of the same things again, simply because people there do them slightly different.
As to helping you in knowing what you want to do for the next 10 year......hmm nope still don't know!
Plato's Academy (Score:2, Interesting)
University education MUST be well-rounded. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a topic I feel very strongly about. Univerities are schools that are strongly grounded in some very old traditions in education: scientific education, liberal education, and to some degree artistic education.
Many here will be familiar with scientific education. Artisitic education is just that: learning to paint, draw, scuplt, act, or write. Liberal education is the true heart of the university: the studies of history, literature, philosophy, classics, etc, and is by far the most important.
Technical education (writing in C++, database management, finance, etc etc) in my book have small use in a university context. Technical skills can easily be picked up by anyone with half a brain and a book; I'm a fair expert in half a dozen programming languages, all of which I picked up in my spare time.
What it is NOT possible to pick up in your spare time is an apprection for, say, the historical context of anti-American sentiment in the middle east (just to give a topical example). Or metaphysics. Good arguments regarding how government can work, or could work, or should work, and what some of the smartest people of all time thought about it. What it means (historically or philosophically) to be a citizen. How to design an experiment in a tight way, how to argue a position. How to speak, how to ask questions. How to take notes, now to takle complicated problems or compilicated issues.
In fact, the fact that you have raised this question signals to me that you haven't gotten such an education: education itself is something that has been thought about for centuries (N.B the earilest universities were born 1200 AD or thereabouts) and universities, despite constant change, have for the most part failed to adopt this narrow, supply-and-demand model you seem to be thinking in.
Scientific training gives a different set of skills, also valuable, if with a different emphasis. One gets an appreciation for the scientific traditions, the scientific context for the world around us, together with analytical skills and the ability to wield doubt and argument as weapons against the unknown.
Technical skills such as the ones you discuss are important, sure.. but I wouldn't rank them any higher than, for example, knowning how to drive a car or use a library, things that CAN be taught in universities, but should not be the main focus of such education.
Higher education is just that: higher.
a well-rounded education was good for me (Score:2, Interesting)
Based on my own experience, then, I think that a well-rounded education is a major benefit. However, everyone is different. Some people are probably ready to go at 17, and don't need the time to figure things out like I did.