Merlin, the best thing you can do is get a liberal...

Merlin, the best thing you can do is get a liberal arts degree plus some kind of a technical skill, and you’ll be able to do whatever you want.

Merlin’s uncle, as quoted by Merlin in Back to Work s01e07

Merlin goes on to say (roughly, I transcribed this and cut out a few nested parentheses):

College shows that you can do two things: you can put up with bullshit, and you can finish projects. Sorry, but that’s what college means. Unless you went to Harvard, unless you were Magna Cum Awesome. You have basically showed that you can finish projects. If you did it in four years, that’s good. You just saved employers a lot of trouble, because now they know you can finish something. That’s kind of really all that it is.

But I gotta say I love the liberal arts. I did not do it perfectly. I did not get the well-rounded education that New College was meant to give me, but I walked out of there feeling like I knew how to identify problems and use a library. And I knew how to write a sentence. And God damn if there aren’t thousands of millions of people who can’t even write a sentence today. That at the time seemed pretty trivial, my love of words and the musicality of language, that seemed so stupid at the time, but thank God that happened.

Liberal arts degree plus some kind of a technical skill. I think I got lucky. But I’d definitely recommend it.

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