Checkout the book Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus. Read an interview of Andrew Hacker. Here is an excerpt:

One of your more controversial points is the idea that every student should major in liberal arts. You’re not fans of majors like engineering or business that try to set a student up for a career right after college.

There are two ways to look at it. First of all, freshmen come in at age 18. Let’s suppose they’ve decided to major in sports management. What’s an 18-year-old going to do in a freshman course in sports management? I’ve attended some undergraduate business courses. The students are young; they don’t have business experience. Really very little is imparted.

The second way to look at it is that liberal arts, properly conceived, means wrestling with issues and ideas, putting the mind to work in a way these young people will only be able to do for these four years. And we’d like this for everyone. They can always learn vocational things later, on the job. They can even get an engineering degree later—by the way, in two years rather than four.

Doesn’t this play into the stereotype of the college graduate coming out with no practical skills and moving back in with his mom and dad? In fact, you even suggest that graduates should work at Old Navy for a year and ruminate on their lives.

In our economy, they’re not really ready for you until you’re 28 or so. They want you to have a number of years behind you. So when somebody comes out of college at 22 with a bachelor’s degree, what can that person really offer Goldman Sachs or General Electric or the Department of the Interior? Besides, young people today are going to live to be 90. There’s no rush. That’s why I say they should take a year to work at Costco, at Barnes & Noble, whatever, a year away from studying, and think about what they really want to do.