The conceit of a liberal arts school (as opposed to a technical school) is that it teaches students how to think, rather than imparting a lot of job specific skills that would be useful to an employer.
In this column, a philosophy PhD explains why.
During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in management. They were wrong about that. I don’t have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy—nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise. Before I took a job telling managers of large corporations things that they arguably should have known already, my work experience was limited to part-time gigs tutoring surly undergraduates in the ways of Hegel and Nietzsche and to a handful of summer jobs, mostly in the less appetizing ends of the fast-food industry.
Trump University, by contrast, was a collection of badly designed courses that promised immediate applicability to implausible get rich schemes.
