Here is what I am willing to grant:
1. "Studies" majors and concentrations are not always focused on future career options (and, neither are plenty of majors and concentrations).
2. Elective courses (i.e., courses that are not specifically required in order to obtain any certain degree) quite often focus on topics and materials that are not focused on future career options.
3. As enrollments-driven institutions, private colleges and universities (to include departments within these universities) must constantly market in order to recruit and retain students. Some of this marketing is done by offering "interesting" elective courses.
3'. Some of this "retention" results in grade inflation.
Now, the arguments in defense of 1 through 3 are easy: private universities can exist for whatever reason they so desire (unlike public universities who are, in theory, controlled by the will and mandate of the taxpayers). They do not have to be focused on future career opportunities; and, so long as students continue to attend and pay, they can do as they please.
The argument in defense of 3a is, at least from my perspective, a necessary consequence of the state of education in America. Most individuals graduating from high school are not equipped with the tools to succeed, based solely on merit, in their first year or two in college. Kids cannot put together papers; they cannot do simply math; they know little to nothing about how science actually works. Quite often they have expansive vocabularies, yet do not know how to use the words. They know how to write out equations, but they cannot tell you what they mean. They have memorized the Periodical Table of Elements, but cannot tell you how it is that elements ought to react with each other. And, if you want to speak about history with some of these kids, just forget about it. The education mill in America produces kids that are capable of memorizing a vast quantity of data (and data-sets), without providing them with the tools to analyze this data critically. If one graded a freshman paper genuinely and honestly according to actual merit, one would fail the vast majority of freshman. This puts the academy in a bind: do they fail the majority of their incoming students? First, this seems unfair to the students; as, it is not entirely their fault that they do not possess these skill sets. Second, the academy loses the money it needs to function. Third, the academy does not help these kids by failing them and tossing them out. Thus, the academy is stuck trying to motivate these kids through comments and handing them C's instead of F's, so that they can continue to work with the kid. The other option seems, to me, to offer more remedial courses to freshman and extend undergraduate to five and six years (or, simply, teach and improve along the way, hoping that by the time most graduate, they will possess respectable skill sets...which, I think, is failing).
Personally, I think you ought to just fail the kid (but, I, unlike most in America, am not a utilitarian nor a consequentialist). I failed my first essay at West Point; I failed my first exam at West Point. It was eye-opening and I realized that I needed to seek out extra help and put in extra effort to develop those skills that I lacked. Of course, this was also not crushing, since, as I was told before entering West Point, no one is ever going to ask about your GPA at West Point. That is not true for other institutions; thus, there may be a problem of fairness if one institution opts to fail a bunch of their freshman. Of course, I do not care about fairness.
