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Lumifer comments on Open thread, Dec. 1 - Dec. 7, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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If you count the courses you suggest, there isn't much room left for a major.
I think a fruitful avenue of thought here would be to consider higher (note the word) education in its historical context. Universities are very traditional places and historically they provided the education for the elite. Until historically recently education did not involve any marketable skills at all -- its point was, as you said, "engaging with contemporary culture on an educated level".
Four to six classes a year, out of about twelve in total? That doesn't sound too bad to me. I took about that many non-major classes when I was in school, although they didn't build on each other like the curriculum I proposed.
It may amuse you to note that I was basically designing that as a modernized liberal arts curriculum, with more emphasis on stats and econ and with some stuff (languages, music) stripped out to accommodate major courses. Obviously there's some tension between the vocational and the liberal aims here, but I know enough people who e.g. got jobs at Google with philosophy degrees that I think there's enough room for some of the latter.
I studied at two state universities. At both of them, classes were measured in "credit hours" corresponding to an hour of lecture per week. A regular class was three credit hours and semester loads at both universities were capped at eighteen credits, corresponding to six regular classes per semester and twelve regular classes per year (excluding summers). Few students took this maximal load, however. The minimum semester load for full-time students was twelve credit hours and sample degree plans tended to assume semester loads of fifteen credit hours, both of which were far more typical.
Sure, but that's evidence that they are unusually smart people. That's not evidence that four years of college were useful for them.
As you probably know, there is a school of thought that treats college education as mostly signaling. Companies are willing to hire people from, say, the Ivies, because these people proved that they are sufficiently smart (by getting into an Ivy) and sufficiently conscientious (by graduating). What they learned during these four years is largely irrelevant.
Is four years of a "modernized liberal arts curriculum" the best use of four years of one's life and a couple of hundred thousand dollars?