>>>What I find more interesting is the number of kids I know who are studying music, theater or art, and hoping to have careers in the field. Both my kids have friends who are pursuing performance careers in New York now. One family we'e been friends with for years has four kids--one's a musician, two are artists, and the youngest is still in college, but planning to go into business.
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>>Of course if you are going to pursue a career in the performing arts, NYC is the place to do it. If the folks at Julliard think you have a shot, you just might. At least you'll have no illusions about how stiff the competition really is. Of course it also helps if there is no pressure to make enough money to pay off student loans or otherwise help families who have sacrificed greatly to fund your education. A college grad in the fourth generation may be seen as delightfully quirky by the family for being a pottery major, but the first generation college grad is going to feel more pull toward an MBA, an MD or a JD.
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>Absolutely and I think that's the phenomenon I'm seeing. Most of the people we know are college graduates, many with post-grad work, many with parents who also went to college (I'm at least 4th generation college-educated on my father's side). These are mostly kids who grew up knowing they were going to college, no questions asked.
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>FWIW, the young people I know trying for careers in music/theater/etc. in New York aren't Julliard students. They're graduates of Amherst or Yale (because that's where my kids met them).

But again these are elite schools, highly competative in both admissions and to achieve success, and students are mentored and advised realistically about their chances of success in a society that 'bows down before charlatans and lets their poets starve'

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>>I did my undergrad at a small liberal arts college that was traditionally just a prep school for prestigious grad schools. ( the draft situation in 1968 made that less so, but nonetheless that was the atmosphere ) In the sixties majoring in anything like business was like saying you were in trade school, learning to be a welder or something. Liberal Arts was all the rule - which of course was fine for Jeopardy but otherwise useless for making a living without a law degree, MBA or Phd for academia to top it off.
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>Remember also that Liberal Arts includes the Sciences, which was a pretty good field to be in the 60's/70's. Not so much today unless it's on the biology side. Tough times to be a Physicist, at least one interested in theory (says the mother of the theoretical Physicist). Research into this stuff is pretty poorly funded right now.

I didn't know that. Always assumed anything in the sciences translated to gainful employment ( if not meaningful work - which I suspect is the tough times you are referring to )

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>>I think later waves of students learned from some of our experience and became a little more realistic about making a living - but in the course of things perhaps a little less educated in the classic sense.
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>We made it really clear to our kids that we wanted them to see college as being a chance to become an educated person. Graduate school is for learning a trade. <s>
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>>I will say that judging by the experiences of classmates who went into academia ( where I was probably headed if I had not fallen down a rabbit hole ) I do not regret leaving that world before the days of political correctness, 'post-modernism', grade inflation and deconstruction.
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>I've taught at the college level as recently as 3 years ago and enjoyed it immensely. OTOH, when I finished my PhD, I opted out of academic research because I had two small children and wanted to be the kind of mom who went on class trips and volunteered in the classroom. I've never regretted my choice (and recently had the opportunity to thank Vint Cerf in person for making it possible).

Of course your discipline is a 'hard' science, less prone to fad and fashion than something like history where deconstructist thought has played havoc with notions of 'truth' - in some cases justifiably so but usually to the detriment of true intellectual objectivity.

Liberal Arts was hijacked by those with a political agenda to a degree that I was spared in the sixties ( it was starting at schools like Columbia and Berkeley but we actually still had freedom of speech and inquiry and our faculty managed to remain somewhat intellectually diverse )

The Balkanization of the gender studies and race studies programs led to such lowered standards of proof and flabby thinking that caused so many well meaning but spineless academics to reduce even the study of history to something more akin to 'committing sociology' <s>

And a lot of the people who were most willing to 'get their minds right' in the era of political correctness are now tenured faculty.

I think I would agree with the late, lamented, Bill Buckley when he said "I'd rather be governed by the first hundred names in the Boston phone book than the faculty at Harvard."