>>12439165well the main problems are that you can't necessarily have a specialization for everything, especially at colleges that don't have great support for your field of study, so you often end up having to get something adjacent to what you actually want. if there's pre-outlined specialization tracks then there's no opportunity to provide classes that cover the basics of those things you are interested in.
for example if i were explicitly interested in japanese culture i'd be shit out of luck at my uni under a specialization system. the department isn't large enough to support a language specialization and a proper culture specialization, so everyone would be forced into linguistics and all the culture classes would disappear since nobody has the elective slots to take them anyway.
a generalized degree is fine in my opinion for a number of reasons. you can sort of self specialize as outlined before, but there are also plenty of careers (management in particular comes to mind) where a broad range of shallow knowledge is more valuable than specialized knowledge
more importantly than all that though college isn't a trade school and for most fields doesn't leave you with the skills you need to actually do a job anyway. at least with the experience of myself and my friends with CS and engineering the vast, vast majority of entry level positions involve months of training and the knowledge of upper division classes barely gets applied to any of the work you actually end up doing because classroom learning and applied work are entirely different sets of skills
a degree is mostly just used as a proof of capacity for learning which is the same reason someone with a business degree can land a job for entry level programming positions so long as they have programming 101 level mastery of the subject. with that in mind i'd argue someone sort of meandering around and taking a random collective of unrelated but specialized classes is better equipped to find a job if anything
