However, we don't need fast Internet connectivity

Yeah, we do.

Have you tried a job search on dialup in the past, say, five years? Or accessing online banking? What about comparison-shopping for cars or living arrangements? Submitting a research paper online (even for an in-person class, as all mine always have been when I was an undergrad--professors still often required online submission)?

Because I have.

Which, of course, defeats the whole purpose of Wikipedia's open-content open-editing model, since now they're tucked away where casual readers won't ever find them.

The problem with the Libertarian Party is that it hates freedom, as evidenced by its love of capitalism.

There's a reason we don't use The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a textbook for late Roman history classes these days.

Just because the time period covered is over doesn't mean the state-of-the-art in our understanding of it is. This applies as much to art history as it does to any other discipline concerned with the past.

b) why does someone want to spend 62 grand for a degree in music.

Because it's interesting.

What, exactly, is "useless" about a liberal arts degree? When you earn a liberal arts degree, you now have a better understanding of a given subject than you did before, and you also have better thinking and communication skills than you did before. That's kind of the whole point, isn't it? Why does anything else matter? I mean, after all, it's education, not job training.

Maybe students need to re examine the efficacy of getting an MFA in post modern Marxist-Anarchist-Lesbian critical literary theory when literally the only job they can get is teaching that to the next crop of like minded students.

People get degrees in that because it's interesting. Nothing else matters.

It's education, not job training. It's about learning for its own sake.

So much of the problem we have today can be attributed to people with ridiculous attitudes like yours who see education as some sort of financial investment or job credential when in fact it is properly understood to be anything but.

The problem is that they claim their book is the word of their god

Not all do. For that matter, not all Christians even believe in a god anyway.

If they can discard parts as allegory, but others as truth, then how do they decide?

Through serious historical and literary analysis. Tolstoy did a pretty good job of it.

Time and money spent on optimization is time and money that can't be spent on other things. With hardware so much cheaper than it was BITD, there's less of a need to optimize--freeing developer resources to be used on other things instead that they wouldn't be able to do if they had to optimize for optimization's sake. It's better this way.

On the contrary, liberal arts programs are worth so much more than any other. A liberal arts graduate:

• Has demonstrated critical thinking abilities
• Can understand the art and literature that make society worthwhile (cool gadgets, medical advances, and whatnot are merely tools--the means, rather than the ends. They're useful and make things easier, but they're ultimately not what really matters)
• Is capable of making complex, nuanced moral judgments based on sound reasoning and taking into account all available evidence
• Has demonstrated communications abilities
• Can actually see beyond his own narrow scope of experiences and preferences
• Is capable of learning anything outside what was covered in his education, and can learn a technical or scientific field on his or her own much better, more quickly, and more easily than someone educated in STEM can learn a liberal arts or humanities field on his or her own

The irony of this comment is that it is actually the liberal arts that require the greater degree of work. I say this as someone who has degrees in both Aeronautical Engineering and History.

The standards and work required for history are much higher than in any science/math/engineering field, simply because the less cut-and-dry nature of liberal arts means much more evidence and much more critical thought must go into proving a point with sufficient rigor.

I'm not sure I accept your assertion that the liberal arts and humanities are "soft." If anything, they're much more rigorous: since what constitutes a "correct" (or at least "valid") response is much less cut-and-dried, and rarely (if ever) speaks for itself, one must put much much more effort into explaining and justifying one's solution, and there's much more information and context outside the immediate problem that needs to be taken into account.

We need fewer engineering graduates, not more. Engineering is easy. It doesn't require expert guidance to pick it up. If someone wants to learn engineering, they can do it on their own time. What universities need to focus on is the humanities and liberal arts. These are much more difficult and rigorous disciplines that require expert guidance--and they teach what really matters, which is the essence of what it means to be a human being. Engineering produces cool gadgets and all, but those gadgets are only a means to an end. The end is a better understanding of the human condition and a capacity for appreciating the full range of human emotions, in oneself and in others. This requires a liberal arts education. Furthermore, a good liberal arts education enables you to pick up literally any other field on your own, especially one as comparatively simple as engineering.

The reason to read the works of (or paraphrases of the works of) ancient or historical thinkers is because they introduced new concepts and new patterns of thought. You can study these concepts and their relationships, and rehearse these patterns of thought, and increase your intellectual ammunition and versatility.

So I can parrot these guys? Become an unoriginal automaton?

The exact opposite, actually: so you can analyze them for their strengths and weaknesses, and adapt their strengths to make your own new discoveries and realizations.

To think you don't need to get deep into some of these areas, and don't need to take time to wander around in each area of knowledge with expert guides, because "there is a wikipedia page for that", is the height of pseudo-intellectual arrogance. You will know the stuff in the same way a parrot knows it. And it will be as much use to you as it is to the parrot.

Damn right there is a wikipedia page for that, information isn't hard to come by these days.

And yet, as your comment's parent points out, you will have zero understanding of the concepts involved: you can memorize and regurgitate facts, but that's it. And without guidance by a credentialed expert in the field, you will have no understanding of the scholarly context to put them in their proper place.

Computer science is a subject they can easily learn on their own, if they're so inclined. It's certainly not essential to producing a well-rounded, knowledgeable individual capable of engaging in independent critical thought. Spend more time on the really important and much more rigorous subjects like history, literature, philosophy, and languages instead. Those are what are important, because they are what make us better [i]people[/i].