I'm not strictly a liberal arts student, but my curriculum involves a series of liberal arts courses, required. I'm also in Communications, meaning that among the arts I study (art school) I'm getting a fairly diverse set of courses, ranging from film to screenwriting to poetry to interface design to a few other things that aren't strictly involved in my major. So even that study is more "liberal arts" than the average technical degree concentration.
> I for one am extremely sceptical that a large set of deeply understood diverse experiences can be obtained in 4 or 5, actually anything less then 10 years, at college.
I think you're assuming that everybody who's attending college is going there to learn a specific skillset that'll help them in their career, and work hard at developing those skills. I view college rather as a place for people to learn more about themselves, and to have the freedoms to discover things they would never discover on their own.
I didn't enter college for Communications. It took me a little while to figure out what I wanted. And in the process of searching I took a variety of classes — programming classes, religious studies, Japanese, an industrial design class — and each one helped me understand a little bit more about what I liked and what I didn't.
What's more, I find that the classes I take that offer me nothing that I'll apply to my eventual business future tend to offer me unexpected flashes of insight. That religion course, for instance, taught me more about social experiences that human beings seek out than any social design course I've sat through; it helped me understand and come to terms with a phenomenon I at once point actively hated as a child. Similarly, a flamenco class I'm taking right now is unexpectedly teaching me a lot about my misconceptions of what music is and how it works socially. (If you don't know, the way flamenco musicians approach their work is much different than the way band musicians do, and the resulting society is vastly different and interesting.)
For a creative mind, all of these things aid both in specific studies — I could reel out a list of scientific discoveries formulated by scientists who were inspired by an utterly different line of thought — and in the more important study, which is: realizing that the world is interconnected in a lot of ways, and that those connections tend to mirror other connections elsewhere, and that studying all these other things will lead to a richer and deeper education/human being.
I do agree with you that my major doesn't force hard work out of people like engineering majors do. I'm a mix myself: I work hard on my out-of-school projects but my classwork depends on how interested I am in the course. I breeze through a lot of things and do pretty well. But I think that's an advantage, too. I don't like that some technical colleges sap a student's soul and make it impossible for them to do stupid college things, or to experiment on projects with their friends. I have friends who want to do things which they simply can't because freshmen-level courses are taking hours and hours out of their every week. And I'm really sad about that, because I know that a lot of people who give up creative projects in college never pick them up again.
College isn't about me getting a job. It's about me becoming a better person. Liberal arts is geared towards making me more diverse and thoughtful than I would be otherwise. It's working.