A reader writes:
I have to respectfully disagree with your assertion that "the main reason for a classical education is precisely its uselessness". I majored in history, with a heavy focus in ancient and Medieval Europe, and I wish I could cop to even the content being useless, but I just can't. I draw on the lessons of history every day when interpreting current events. I roll my eyes at people comparing America's "empire" to that of Rome (we're really a lot closer to the Delian League – Athens' economic empire that thrived in the 5th century). I look at today's rising inequality and I see traces of the Roman inequality that destroyed a Republic in the span of a century.
But the most useful part of majoring in history wasn't learning history; it was learning how to learn and how to understand things.
It was learning how to take a complete jumble of names, dates, places, facts, ideas, conjecture, and so on and build from it a stable, mostly-consistent picture of what really happened. It's a skill that, quite frankly, has formed the backbone of my career. Useless? Hardly. But it's the kind of learning that defies easy quantification.
Another writes:
You are missing the point. The question isn't whether classical studies are valuable. The question is whether they justify their cost. We've been programmed to believe that a college education is a ticket to the middle class regardless of the cost. But that's wrong. Would you pay $50k for a philosophy degree? $100k? $500k? At some point, that answer becomes "no".
The problem isn't that classical studies aren't valuable – quite the contrary. But the real issue is that no one knows how valuable. It would be a great boon for society if we could place a dollar value (perhaps tied to future earnings) on various college degrees. That way people could make informed decisions on whether or not the tuition was worth it. People should be able to decide for themselves whether a classics degree is a good fit for them, financially speaking.
Another:
I've had several positions during my working life where I have had the opportunity, or burden, of wading through resumes at either the first or second stage of the hiring process for a new position. Some of the positions have required no more than a high-school education, some a two-year degree, others a four-year degree.
No one should be fooled by those who dismiss higher education, especially in the liberal arts. Those students with a strong liberal arts background are far more likely to write a coherent sentence or paragraph. Written communications skills are more necessary than ever, not less. Rising travel costs for business and government have required more web-based communication and meetings. The ability to string together a group of ideas into a logical sequence, or to know the difference between a hypothesis and a theory (or a hypothesis and an ellipsis, for that matter), makes someone far more appealing as an employee.
A technical degree will help you get a job in an IT section, but if you can't express yourself and communicate abstract ideas to your co-workers or subordinates, you will be imposing a cost of low productivity that cannot be measured and could have been mitigated.
The Dish 