@steellord,
You misconstrue me quite badly. I never said an MSU education was a better value, nor did I say that the vocational choices of MSU students were well-informed. I’m just saying, in response to a question about why so many more Michigan residents apply to MSU than UM, that there’s a certain way that many economically insecure people view a college education, and the University of Michigan’s profile is, well, more challenging to a lot of those people than is MSU’s. At MSU a far higher percentage of undergrads are enrolled in “practical” majors like actuarial science, apparel and textiles, food science, dietetics, and packaging–majors that may or may not lead to jobs, but even if there are jobs, many of the jobs will be neither particularly well paying nor particularly satisfying work. Others think they’re doing something “practical” by studying things like journalism, oblivious (or willfully obtuse) to the fact that jobs in that field are increasingly scarce, highly competitive, and in most cases low-paying. I could say the same about certain STEM fields at either school; bio majors, for example, tend not to do well in the job market unless they go beyond their undergrad training to acquire advanced degrees in medicine, some other health profession, or more rarely, a Ph.D. in some bio specialty.
My own view is diametrically opposed to such narrow careerist thinking. I was a philosophy major at Michigan, and my life has turned out quite well. My older daughter was (with my support and encouragement) a classics major at a leading LAC, and my younger daughter is an art history major at another leading LAC. Who knows what career paths they will ultimately follow, but I’m not particularly worried about it because they’ve both acquired critical reasoning, critical reading, analytical, and written and oral communication and argumentation skills that will serve them well whatever they end up doing. Cream rises, and relative to the vast majority of college grads, they’re the cream. Call me an elitist. Call me the last believer in the value of a traditional liberal education. One of the reasons–perhaps the most important reason–that I continue to love and support my undergraduate alma mater is that the pure academic flame is still alive and well there, at a time when it is being snuffed out at lesser institutions, and there’s clearly public support for such snuffing out. Frankly, your suggestion that today’s Michigan students are as narrowly careerist as MSU’s students is discouraging news to me. I only hope you’re wrong.