I think that a lot of what people learn in colleges/universities is nearly completely useless. I say this as a person who has spent a large portion of his life obtaining university degrees, who subsequently worked in a lot of fields and different types and sizes of businesses, and who has hired people into his departments in a lot of different fields, including people from Caltech, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and various highly rated public schools (University of Michigan, etc.).
A college degree does provide something akin to "Oh, you got into X, which is a good place, and you did well there. So, I suspect that you are fairly smart." It doesn't mean that the person has learned much that is practical for a job, and it doesn't fully correlate with how productive a person will be.
Majoring in history, music, art, philosophy, theater, languages, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, etc., in my opinion, is flushing money down the toilet. Those are hobbies -- people should study them in their spare time (unless they are 1 in 100,000 who can make a decent profession out of it).
I think that it is also a waste of money to go to expensive private schools unless they have significantly more usable cache than a good public university. For example, getting an MBA from Harvard can be worth the money. Getting a degree from some expensive liberal arts college instead of a good public university is a waste of money, in my opinion.
If a person is going into a technical field at a technician level, a technical school can sometimes be a better choice -- faster, more to the point, cheaper, quicker into the job market, and less useless crap than a university.
