With school as expensive as it is, I can't see the point of getting a liberal arts education, at all.
Whatever job you get after you graduate seems to have more to do with who you know rather than how good you were at analysing Shakespeare. I know some kids who went to school with me and are now employed but this is becase 1)
they did a lot of career-related stuff, internships in their free time or 2) they were douchebags then, are douchebags now, and have been using their douchbaggery to get ahead ever since.
Here's an article
about the BA from someone who likes BA's and here's another one about a really smart kid who
made a bunch of shit up and got into Harvard. LOL.
That's probably true, but still, it depends on what you want to do with your life. You're going to need a degree for certain things, and you can also learn about finance and how to invest and make powerful contacts in college.
If your main goal in life is to piss off your father, you might want to go ahead and get the degree and find another way to piss off your father. (I have no idea whatsoever if this is your situation or not, since I don't know you, or your father, but that situation seems to apply to a lot of people who have parents or others lined up to help pay for their educations.) Flushing opportunity down the toilet just to rebel is foolish and you will wind up regretting it, nearly certainly. <<<That was purely metaphorical and not intended to be personal at all!
Generally speaking, if someone is offering to teach you something, and give you higher status in the process, it would be smart to take them up on that offer. I don't think any opportunity to learn
anything is worthless, but you certainly can pay too much for it, and that's why looking into ways to save money and not going to a for-profit university is very smart.
Also, there is a limited market for things like fine needlework or analyzing Shakespeare or something, so you might want to crunch the numbers before paying for a degree like that and know what you are getting into.
And regarding the douchebaggery, it does generally come back to haunt a person, eventually. It's much better long-term to focus on more of a collaborative, helpful mindset, IMO. That's why volunteering is such a good idea, because you learn so much and meet people and are in a very cooperative collaborative environment, typically.
...BTW, those were good articles. I laughed at the quote from the first one:
...but four years of college still give youngsters in late adolescence a chance to encounter different kinds of people, to discover new interests, and to decide what they want to make of their lives. And if it is true that some students spend too much of their college years partying, that was also true of many Oxford students in the 18th century. Lighten up.
That's about half the battle for most people, figuring out what they even want to do with their lives and being aware of the possibilities. It can be very limiting not to know what is possible, you know?