Because our system is designed to keep a significant portion of our youth out of the labor market until they are in their mid to late-20s. Our society encourages an extension of the "teenage" years until people reach about 30. Why? Because we have the baby boomers who are at the apex of their power and earning potential, and they don't want a bunch of upstarts coming in and competing with them right when they are in the home-stretch to retirement. Why liberal arts? Because our public school systems do such a poor job teaching mathematics and hard sciences that liberal arts is the only viable option for most high school grads. If you couldn't understand algebra and trigonometry in high school, then you sure as hell aren't going to be signing up for pre-calculus in college.... You want to have time to party and get laid like the Jersey Shore douches. Look the Vietnam draft dodger class is now in charge of "higher education" now. They need students to keep their gravy train rolling. The whole system is designed to in-debt the gullible while selling them snakeoil like: "get an degree in English literature from Fancy-pants University, and you will be valuable to some employer somewhere."
Huh? You couldn't sit in the same room with graduates of top liberal arts colleges and keep up in conversation. They certainly offer something different than the Harvards, but third or fourth tier? You must be delusional.
We now have 1 out of 7 people in the U.S. on food stamps and almost 18% unemployment rate if you go by the U-6 number... http://usdebtclock.org/ It will probably get worse, because of the lousy job market and constant outsourcing of jobs. Outsourcing makes sense for a company from a financial standpoint, since they can pay the worker's alot less money and not have to worry about huge health insurance costs for their employees. What is the point of spending tens of thousands of dollars on college, and assuming you take on student loans, getting stuck with debt that can't be discharged in a bankruptcy. Being self-employed is the way to go for many people, unless you want to be a nurse, doctor, or lawyer, but not everyone can or wants to pursue a career in one of those three fields.
There is plenty of stuff you can learn online for free: Khan Academy makes educational content available online for free http://www.khanacademy.org/ Free Online Courses from great universities http://universitiesandcolleges.org/free-online-college-courses/ Save your college money to take a trip around the world or to start a business when you are ready. You may find a place you rather work or do business in your travels.
Sorry kid, it's a pretty well established fact that the Ivies will get you in the door of more lucrative jobs than the third and fourth tier schools will. The saving grace for some of the schools down the list are the alumni networks. btw, for probably more than 30 years (longer than you've been on this earth), they've been ranking liberal arts colleges according to admissions rates, SAT scores and percentage of students in the top 10% of their graduating high school class. Pretty straightforward. Don't humor me with your schtick about keeping up in conversation, after all I speak from quite a bit of experience.
By the way, she could go to the Philippines for nurse training for a lot less. Many Filipina nurses come to work in the USA.
Why is everyone here so limited and thinks so small? Why not go to a top school and travel the world like hippie says? Your beliefs are very limiting. It's quite sad. And this is the exact reason you will never break out of the middle class.
YES! I've been waiting for this topic. Which SCHOOL IS THE NUMBER ONE FORBES RATED SOUTHERN ACADEMIC INSTITION IN THE SOUTH? Hi, here's a clue..................who's bwolinsky? Shall I deposit IQ and Income?
Well, normally you go to college to hopefully get a job. After finding that my Econ BA was only good to get a job at Radio Shack, I enrolled in a trade school, where I got a network engineering certification (CNE) and actual job skills in that I was able to administrate servers for large corporations and get paid over $ 65.000 /yr. Now I try to make money trading which is much harder to do.