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Education matters in the modern era if (and only if) it verifies the existence of actual skill. The issue with self-taught expertise is that it can be extremely hard to verify. I can simply claim to have studied English Literature, but what I really did was skim Shakespeare, then read the Daily Mail. You can’t really tell unless you’re willing to and able to test me for proof of skill. If I have the degree from UCLA, you can look at the curriculum and my transcripts and know what kinds of work I did.
College has the same problem that traditional martial arts have. You need the belts to determine where in the curriculum the student is, but it’s easy for the unscrupulous to simply allow people to buy their belts with little regard for whether or not anything is being learned.
But the point of a four year degree, for the ones people actually get, is proving you can answer emails, use grammarly, keep drama to a minimum, etc. Not showing mathematical literacy.
It’s possible that standards for a bachelor’s in English/psychology/communications/etc have been so reduced that it doesn’t even do that. But that is a different argument than ‘they don’t learn calculus’- that’s what ‘for non-math majors’ means, we already knew.
When I was in college, they added a universally-required undergraduate writing course (fortunately with a test-out option). I suppose "Graduates of $PRESTIGIOUS_INSTITUTION should be able to
string two sentences togetherwrite persuasively" makes sense from the board's perspective, but at the time I remember thinking that requiring calculus would probably improve those outcomes more ("should be able to understand derivatives and complex statistics"). In some ways it felt more like an excuse to hire a lot of adjunct faculty and grad students to teach those classes, although it might have made sense targeting international (mostly graduate) students.More options
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