My Bach degree was in history, and I often wrote off the importance of the “critical thinking” skills we learned in that program.

Boy was I wrong, I know too many people who need nothing more than an unsourced headline to fully convince them of something ludacris.

Arts education (which I mean to encompass not just visual art but also literature, plays, music, etc) is important because without it you get idiots with no media literacy. An arts degree, specifically, may not be important or beneficial for the average person, but classes in which one must think critically about the creator, the creator's intent, the context in which the art was created, and the reception of the art are how you teach people to be well-rounded individuals who don't just vomit out the first half-baked thought their curdled brain cobbled together from propaganda.

I like to think it stands for enlightenment

Studying engineering is nothing like science technology or math, so I basically just forget it's there at all.

People should study the arts, schools shouldn't pretend they yield jobs just because you get a degree and charge the same as a career specific degree

That would absolutely go on my wall of shame along with several industry certifications I have where the software I'm certified for stopped existing (sometimes within a few months of my certification).

The limit as a STEM major's GPA approaches 0.0 is a business degree.

The difference between computer science, computer engineering and software engineering is pretty nuanced in a lot of ways. Same core knowledge base. Sprinkle a little extra math and logic abstraction and you get a CS degree. More principles of development and team based work, and get a SE degree. More hardware and systems, and get a CE degree. And all three of them touch a bit on the other two.

More than a few of my team of software engineers and data engineers have degrees in things like chemistry or business. They just took a boot camp to learn to develop.

CS used to be the only degree that concentrated on software development.

I work with code both from people who have a degree in CS and people who learned on the job and there’s a huge difference

That may be more true today with more math heavy focuses like computer vision or neural networks. But most everything else is better learned on the job or via YouTube. Unless you plan to specialize like that, it’s almost certainly better to just teach yourself.

I’ve hired dozens of engineers from both university and self-taught backgrounds, and the self-taught ones are by far superior. In fact, it’s not uncommon that I have to break the bad habits taught in university - those courses are painfully outdated and the professors often have self-serving motives that hurt their students.