A good STEM program teaches you how to think, and that never gets outdated.
Colleges offer a smorgasbord of courses to take. If you select courses for the easiest route to a degree, you won't be that employable. If you select courses that will give you the best foundation for your chosen career, that'll do much better.
For example, although I got a degree in engineering, I made sure I also took a class in business accounting. (That class has paid off well for me.)
What I mean by "how to think" is developing organized thought processes for solving (seemingly) hard problems. For example, breaking a large problem into smaller ones, solving the smaller ones, then assembling the solution into a larger one. When faced with a problem, determining what you know and don't know about it. An organized methodology for distinguishing facts from baloney.
All these skills are developed in the process of STEM training. I know I got an awful lot better at it after 4 years of that, and I can see the deficits in those abilities in people who have not undergone such.
For example, given someone debugging their program - I see many programmers who will just try guessing things randomly. If they get lucky with this approach, they often have little idea of why their change made it work. (Often, nor do they care.) But they do spend an awful lot of time with this method, compared with someone who sets about finding the problem in an organized fashion.
Everyone learns to think one way or another, and it continues well past 18. The human brain is still physically developing at 18.
So since you're going to learn to think after 18, a good college education provides the shortest cut to learning to think WELL, based on the accumulated experience of thousands of years of human history.
No, I have done no research on this. But if you went for a degree in EE, and took only the minimum of electronics courses, then you'd have a skill deficit compared with a person who took every advanced EE course he could stuff into his schedule? For example, he layered on analog electronics, and you took only digital, that you'd have a problem when faced with a job that needed a bit of analog?
And yes, I've seen EEs flummoxed when faced with a bit of noise in their digital circuit, when a guy who knew some analog had it fixed pronto. Which engineer was more employable?
I don't think Walter Bright meant that listing the courses you took on your resume is going to make you more (or less) employable. I think the point was that taking difficult classes will better prepare your for work.
I slightly disagree with this position, difficult doesn't mean better (depending on your definition of better). For example, I would have been better served to take a class on databases rather than a class on computational geometry.
I didn't mean necessarily taking hard classes. I meant taking classes that would provide a foundation for your career, rather than selecting classes based solely on how easy they are.
A good STEM program teaches you how to think, and that never gets outdated.
Colleges offer a smorgasbord of courses to take. If you select courses for the easiest route to a degree, you won't be that employable. If you select courses that will give you the best foundation for your chosen career, that'll do much better.
For example, although I got a degree in engineering, I made sure I also took a class in business accounting. (That class has paid off well for me.)