What bothers me the most about US higher education is the sheer waste of time and money it can be. This is directly connected to how bad our secondary (say, middle to high school) education has become.

In terms of secondary education, after a dozen years of schooling young adults are launched into the world with exactly zero marketable skills. Zero.

What is the average US high school graduate good for?

Stacking boxes and, after training, making coffee and a number of other low skill/knowledge jobs.

This, from my perspective, is a travesty, a serious breach of the trust we place on a system of education that seems to have no ability to deliver real value for the money we spend.

At the university level we easily add a year or two to degrees by adding what I call “degree-irrelevant” courses.

An engineering degree should not have —as a graduation requirement— history, social science or non-technical classes.

Please note I said “graduation requirement”. You should not need to pass a class on Middle Earth History and Poetry to obtain an Electrical Engineering degree. This is silly and it wastes a tremendous amount of time and money.

Why do we have this?

Well, our secondary education sucks, so we teach and re-teach that which should have been learned in high school.

Worse than that, because the government is in the student loan business (and they are dumb as can be) the education “mafia” figured out how to fatten-up degrees to extract more money out of the system.

A history class is inexpensive to teach, and yet it costs the same per credit than, say, a chemistry class that requires more infrastructure. Degrees are padded with crap no employer values at all.

If you go to a university that costs, say, $30K to $50K per year, you likely have somewhere in the range of $30K to $80K in coursework loans that is utterly irrelevant to your degree.

The other angle is that, without this coursework we would be able to graduate engineers about 25% faster than we do, which would be a competitive advantage.

These graduates would start their professional lives with about 25% less debt. The lifetime benefits of this cannot be understated.

The opportunity cost, for the person and prospective employer, of taking an additional year or more to graduate people with technical degrees is, in the aggregate, massive in scale.

Someone might say: A well rounded education is important!

Absolutely agreed! Just not as a graduation requirement that adds tens of thousands of dollars to the already abusive cost of education and, in most cases, over a year of time to obtaining a degree.

This is where secondary education should shine. We should demand that young adults emerge from that system with both a well-rounded education and marketable skills.

Society would benefit immensely if we were better at the business of education, from K through university.

EDIT:

As one of many personal examples. Many years ago I hired an EE out of Intel. He spent around five years there designing switching power supplies. That's what I hired him for. He worked for my company for several years doing exactly that, designing switching power supplies. The fact that his US degree required him to take a bunch of irrelevant courses added exactly zero value to what he could do for anyone who might hire him, myself included. This means this person wasted a year+ of his life in school taking courses nobody cares about (and nobody will pay him for). A year later I hired yet another EE to do the same work. His degree was from Europe. He had nearly zero non-STEM coursework. He performed just as well, and in some aspects better, than the US-graduated EE.

I don't understand why we allow the education system to do things that are demonstrably detrimental from nearly every angle. If someone does want to study philosophy or history while obtaining a degree, no problem at all. It should be THEIR decision. And, if they think it might have future value to employers, they would get to highlight the fact that they took and passed such coursework. They could even opt to go for a minor in a certain area of study. Again, this should be the decision of the student and it should self-select based on the ultimate value assigned to such studies by society, not imposed upon every single student by a system with already ridiculous cost structures.