50 years ago less than 10% of the public went to college. But the flip side of that is that the degree programs were limited to mostly legitmate fields of endeavor that required the knowledge in order to do a job industry required. You had to have a degree to be a civil engineer, an accountant, a doctor, a lawyer, etc.. But that was all that was ever offerred.
Nonsense.
Liberal Arts education used to be the degree one got that lead to leadership positions in most industries.
Technologists used to be thought clever, but not leadership material.
They were thought not well rounded people, and were basically thought of as TOOLS to be used by the master class.
In fact most Ivy leagues schools started out with only one major...religion. Over time, other majors, including technical majors were added to most colleges and universities.
Now you have colleges offerring degrees in all sorts of CRAP coupled with a tremendous DEMAND. We've become a society that somehow REQUIRES a college degree to show success even if the degree is useless mush.
Clearly a liberal arts degree in social sciences or the humanities is a poor investment if the purpose of your education is making a living nowadays, I quite agree with that sentiment, Zoom.
Our society will, of course, suffer for that in the long run for that, because, while technical education is a great way of making a a living, a society truly needs people to have a well rounded education, too.
It's a great myth the education establishment created to grow itself. As a percentage of population we still put out about the same percentages of engineers, programmers, doctors we always have.
Interesting statistic. Do we graduate as many or more computer programmers, today, as we did in 1930, do you think?
If you want to get a degree in something that pays just check the salary research sites. Otherwise, learn a trade, because majoring in crap business does not value is a waste of money and time.
Very true. The world, or at least
our world today, is really all about business .. the BUSINESS of medicine, the BUSINESS of science, the BUSINESS of engineering.
In fact I'd go so far to to suggest that that philosophy is at the very heart of most of what people find most annoying about our world today.
Not that business exists, but that everything much be reduced to the bottom line, even if by doing so we make our world a place where the only thing that matters is money, and NOT people.
But hey, I realize that that is my prejudiced value system speaking, too.
Still,
I think we need to strike a balance between the business of living in a material world, and the art of being humans living in the complex and sometimes perplexing society those businesses helped to create.
The market will eventually price itself out of range as many people realize they are no longer going to spend large sums of money on useless degrees and we will bust back to colleges teaching LEGITIMATE college material.
You bias against academic subjects notwithstanding, to suggest that those academic fields are "crap" is sort of shortsighted, I think.
One of the "crap" subjects you are complaining about is the one which makes it possible for you and I to be having this discussion right now, champ. It's called the ART of rhetoric.
I'd go so far as to say that while the techical fields make a wealthier civilized life possible, the subjects which you are now characterizings as "crap" ARE just as important to having a civilized world as any techology we will ever invent or discover.
It would be an impoverished world indeed if there were no arts or social sciences, I think.
So, to summarize, while I completely agree with you that only the scions can really afford a liberal arts education, today, I think the world is a sadder, meaner, and less humanistic place, because of that change in our value system.
Liberal arts and science are really the foundation upon which the technical sciences were built.
We need experts in all fields, but we also need to fund those fields so that they too can continue to bring good things to life.
And that is what this society is failing to do.
Now I happen to be an educator.
I need funding, just like any scientist or engineer does, to build my educational system.
Believe me when I tell you that money is tight in that field.
And that really is a damned shame too, because I have to tell you that the return on investment for my project is better than the return on investment for most things that we invest in in this society.
For the price of a medium sized tank, I could develop an online educational system that would serve millions people a year for NOTHING.
As my mother would have said,
we are being penny wise and pound foolish, when it comes to investing in education.
I get notices for grant funding every day by email/
90% of them are for science and technology funding and very very few of them have anything to do with the BUSINESS of education.
There actually is a point... 
