In response to a post by my brother Eugene about the humanities, I came up with the following comment which I decided to turn into a post (it's kind of long).
I postulate a degree will become completely unimportant within 30-50 years (hey, I believe in the slow-accumulating-changes version of history).
I can't actually answer for any other field but English, but based on English, I think it will change because businesses will begin to realize that the people they are hiring can't write. Whatever their transcripts say, they aren't any more capable than someone without a college degree.
Actually, this is already happening. Based on an article that I use to scare my students (by an educator, so take it for what it is worth), 80% of "surveyed corporations" assess writing during hiring; 40% of the companies require extra writing training for employees (I can actually verify this; they do it at Microsoft), and writing "deficiencies" cost businesses in America $3.3 billion a year. I'm assuming this includes all that training.
It troubles me that (many of) my students not only cannot write grammatically correct sentences, they also, bizarrely enough, can't format their documents. I thought high schools had computers now? And don't they use their computers all the time? A student who can't format a Word document to the right margins, right font, and automatic double-spacing is going to have a tough row to hoe. (As I can attest based on a woman I once had to train who had zero computer skills. I was teaching her how to find files by opening correct folders; yeah, she didn't last.)
I don't actually pass anyone who can't communicate semi-clearly, and my grading has gotten tougher over the past five years (more B's than A's), but I will admit that I have very mixed feelings about the whole grading side of the equation. I think it is important for people to earn their grades, and I use clearly defined (and basic) criteria to grade. But I also can't forget (what with my massive student loan) that they are paying for the course and part of me is very, very angry because I feel like the system let them down. "They shouldn't be here!" I keep thinking. "They already had 12 years of school!" Or, "I should be focusing on stuff other than grammar!"
On the other hand, the students who can write clean, professional-looking documents do deserve the better grades, and if I passed a student who couldn't get across an idea at all, I would be committing fraud. But if colleges held composition students to the same standards I had to reach as a legal secretary, very few of my students would get even B's. I don't know how the community colleges I work for would respond if I started giving only C's, but giving all your students C's makes some online colleges very uneasy. (Some majors require their students to get at least "B's" in writing, so students with "C's" can't progress, which means the students drop out of the programs, and the colleges lose money.)
The irony to all this--or maybe it isn't ironic, just sad--is that if businesses stopped hiring based on degrees, they would have to hire based on intrinsic ability. In other words, the whole idea of learning-to-be-better would vanish. My students who start out the semester with A's end the semester with A's, and they would be the people getting hired. Does this confirm a meritocracy or do away with it?
To be fair, 1/3 to 1/2 of my students do improve over the semester, but those who improve can't improve until they are willing to reject their diary-like, stream-of-consciousness thoughts, accept that good grammar matters, and know what they want to say. (And why should any company hire anyone who can't do these three things?)
Although, to be fair some more, a lot of so-called, white-collar professionals can't write either. (See "deficiencies" above.) This is why secretaries exist.
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