Speaking as someone embedded within higher ed, and quite openly biased toward the North American/Scottish liberal arts education model (which, I’ll note, is slowly eroding in the United States):
[ul][]The most obvious strength of a focused preprofessional curriculum is that students graduate prepared for a specific—and fairly often, relatively lucrative—job, and so the immediate return on investment tends to be quite good. The most obvious drawback is that if that job training becomes outdated—whether because the job field itself falls victim to something like automation or because the job description changes in radical ways over time—then the narrow focus of the individual’s training may well become a liability in searching for a replacement career, and (often expensive) retraining may be required, which could significantly reduce the return on investment potential.
[]The clearest weakness of a liberal-arts curriculum is that students graduate not prepared for a specific job field, and so enter the job market requiring on-the-job training, and therefore, since the costs of professional training are being borne by the employer, the relative salary and benefits are likely to be lower for a period of time, possibly for many years. The corresponding benefit is that individuals trained in such a curriculum have a wider range of career fields to choose from at the outset, and appear to find it easier to switch career fields (whether by choice or by necessity) later in life. (Also, perhaps related to all that, the return on investment ten+ years out appears to be pretty much even from studies I’ve seen, though the opportunity costs of a lower income earlier in life are difficult to measure.)[/ul]
Really, as with many choices in life, it’s an exercise in risk tolerance.