I wish I could major in problem solving

Because honestly, that's what I'm taking the most out of college so far. All the concepts you learn, the books you read, the specific technical details, they're all unimportant. I'm going to need to relearn the specifics as they apply to the company I'll be working at next year anyway, through their own training program.

Really, the important things to learn in college revolve around preparing your brain for the problem solving of the future. Especially coming out of a nice Ivy League school, I feel like I have some sort of responsibility for making the world a better place, and that entails solving some problems. The technical details of each problem vary, but the problem solving core is what is important to address.

This addresses the heart of human innovation. Before, tons of stuff got invented because the problem solving was very self-evident and anybody can participate. Now, there are tons of technical barriers that prevent non-specialists from participating in the innovative and problem-solving process. This is something that is very important to address--human innovation will be driven much faster if we can compartmentalize what the true problems at the core of these issues are, and strip away all of the technical nonsense. Just look at how fast gamers were able to find the shape of the AIDS protein on fold.it, compared to more specialized researchers.

The big problem with majors and college educations dedicated to teaching someone a specific major is that it implies that these technical barriers are acceptable, and perhaps worse, encourages them. I guess, of course, you need people with the specific technical knowledge in order to break down the barriers and make things accessible. At the same time, encouraging people to specialize too early reduces amount of time people can be given a general, comprehensive background on problem solving. There's an important balancing act to be made here.

That's ultimately why I feel like, at least for some schools, the only major should be problem solving. Obviously for more vocational backgrounds, you need that specific skills-based education, but in a liberal arts setting, people should just be given comprehensive, diverse educations to encourage them to develop their problem solving mentalities. Technical specifics are mostly all covered during grad schools anyway, and people should just start specializing afterward.

Maybe I'm biased because I'm still not ready to specialize and still want to explore all the different things you can do in the world :P

PS
So yeah, sorry about not doing another post about design, this is just what I thought of. I'll probably do one more ideas-based post like this one about my faith in humanity, and then the one after that will be design-oriented. Although this post is basically about education design :)