Take this from someone who entered college nearly 46 years ago. What you take out of college that is the most valuable will not be the paper they hand you at graduation, the friends, the social experiences, the fraternity/sorority letters but what you learn. More than just the facts you cram will be the ability to think, to reason, to evaluate, to judge and use the facts you remember.
If you cram it to pass a test and don't really learn the material, if you forget it the day after the test, that piece of paper will get you a job. It will also put you in a place that every day you say to yourself, "If they really knew how little I know they would get rid of me." Living with that is scary. The alternative is to go into academia where nobody will ever question if you know anything once you join a union and get tenure. If you become a part of the academia collective that thinks like everyone else you will be next to worthless. BTW, there are people in academia who are not like that. Most of them can be identified easily, they are the ones who are treated as eggheads by their colleagues that are playing the game.
The real test of your education is not if you can pass the tests the professors give, it is whether you can pass the comprehensive final after you leave college. It is called day to day on the job.
I've been in the work force all but 4 months of the 51 years since my 16th birthday in December 1959. Nearly every job I have had prepared me for something I would do later. Nearly every class I took in college has contributed to my success later in some way. I'm not sure about the music class but the art class did give me some confidence in doing things that would later help me. You see, not everything that is of value is on the course syllabus. Sometimes professors actually teach something by accident. This is good because some have a hard time doing it on purpose.
My degree is in Math but one of the math items I used to my advantage in 1986 was covered in detail in a Psychology class in the summer of 1962 - twenty four years before. I pulled the book, I still had it, and reviewed material I had only used briefly to pass a Statistics (math) test in 1964. I really learned it's value in the Psych class. I solved a business problem overnight that had stumped everyone in the work group for weeks and proved the solution in three days. My reputation that got me continual large raises was built on just such events, this was not the only time I was able to use something like that.
I started in 1965 at 1/14 of what I retired at in 1996 - 31 years, an average 14% per year increase. Even with inflation this is significant. I did that on the reputation of knowing something about whatever we needed to do and if I didn't I new where to look and I would find out. Evening trips to a library were not rare. Home experiments in electronics were not unusual. That was built on my college education, my high school education, experience and the reading I did outside the classroom. By the time I was 14 I had read the whole World Book Encyclopedia several times and had read part of the Britannica. I knew a lot but more than that I knew how to find information I didn't have. There are easier ways to learn today, more information available, but the answer is the same. Do you learn the batting averages of major league players or the names of the celebrities or the things that will put you in a position to succeed?
Let me put it this way. Learning the Greek alphabet and the names of upper classmen have limited career value. How far you can kick a football or make a basket will not significantly impact your career goals unless you become a professional player - and those slots are few.
Since my retirement from my first career in 1996 I have had several jobs. I collected the retirement, consulted in computer work during the Y2K time, taught for a while, then moved on to computer networking. I have proven my value to this new organization.
I graduated from high school with an unimpressive position of the third fifth of my class. I scored a 1236 on college boards with a 469 on the verbal. I was one of less than a handful of students at Shippensburg State College from the third fifth of any class in the fall of 1961. I worked in the computer room and did the breakdowns so I saw them. I was the only one over 1000 total. I graduated from Shippensburg with a very unimpressive 2.67. But I worked a job all but a few months of those three and one half years - most of the time working over 40 hours a week and commuting 25 miles one way. With no job and living nearby that would easily have gone up a point but the degree was impossible without working. I had a goal. My first job out of college would have been denied if I had not had the degree. I passed the entrance test at that company with one of the highest scores they ever saw. My college performance didn't matter. In fact over the next year they went back and actively recruited at Shippensburg - and hired four people, three of which stayed on and retired from the company shortly after I did in 1996 and were all top performers. The highest GPA in the group was under 3.0. The one who didn't work out from Ship? A 3.8 GPA who passed everything by cramming but couldn't think.
Hope this helps someone.
velvetdreams