College Allows for More Than Money Making

Many Moorpark High School seniors who are on their way to college this fall will inevitably have to answer the "So, what are you majoring in?" question. At first, it seems rather innocuous, but it is, in all actuality, an incredibly loaded question.
The question people are really asking is, "How are you going to make a living?"
I was raised understanding that the purpose of college was to get an education and to learn to become a free thinker. College was demonstrably an intellectual pursuit. If you could learn a marketable trade as well, all the better.
Even now, as I pursue my master's degree in journalism, people constantly ask me, "But how are you going to make money?"
I lightheartedly make a crack about marrying rich but feel somewhat slighted that my interests and livelihood are useless if they can't provide me with enough money for a summer home on Maui.
It rarely crosses anyone's mind that I'm content to make enough money to live modestly but comfortably, and that I value my education as a commodity more important than any fancy car or Beverly Hills address.
I was raised in a family where the reigning motto was, "No matter what you lose in life, no one can take away your knowledge. It's the only thing you can never lose."
I find it heartbreaking that so many of our local young men and women feel that the only benefits they can reap from college are job skills. In my opinion, those four or five years are wasted time if you don't take advantage of everything else that's out there by exposing yourself to opinions and people you'd never choose to talk to in the world outside of academia.
It's true that academia is an insulated world apart from the rest, and as such, it is the perfect place to take advantage of all the experiences you can only have cloistered away at a university.
It is up to the next generation of young adults to learn about history, the world and politics; to make their own informed choices about the future they want for themselves and their country. If your sole focus is making money, how are you contributing to the system that allowed you to pursue that avenue? How can you ever learn to think in terms of us rather then me and them if you don't stretch your socio-cultural wings within the safety of an educational institution?
I hear so many high school students lament their inability to pursue a liberal arts education because they can't make a killing doing what they love. The community colleges and public universities continue to decrease funding in the liberal arts while increasing funding for research and business, continuing the downward spiral of a public education system that was built to nourish the future leaders of our state by providing a well-rounded education.
As public colleges become a more capitalistic venture, searching to make a bigger profit margin each year, we send the message that a liberal arts education is worth less than the almighty dollar, and therefore not a critical investment.
When the next generation can master economics on paper, but can't grasp the cultural aspects of business, maybe then people will realize that the local universities have failed in their mission, and we'll have to start from scratch.
I hope the seniors graduating in the coming weeks realize that they need to keep up the good fight to protect their quickly diminishing educational avenues. It's not too late.

Do you agree there is value in pursing knowledge strictly for the sake of knowledge? Or is a study of the liberal arts useless in this day and age? 

Source http://moorpark.patch.com/