Tonight I’ll be taking the stage at the Agora debate in the Guardian newsroom. Here’s my contribution (as Adrian Monk) to Education Guardian in support of the motion: Renaissance Man is dead. Education should be about training in subjects that will boost the economy.

What do we know about the world since the Renaissance? Almost every single forward movement in advancing the position of humankind has come from science, technology and business.

James Watt developed the steam engine that powered the Industrial Revolution in a workshop at Glasgow University. His partnership with Matthew Boulton made it a commercial success.

Where will the advances that take us forward in this century come from? Will they emerge from study of the nineteenth century novel, or being able to translate the Hesiod, or from theology (I’m open to taking bets)?

You know the answer, and yet we continue to subsidise 30% of our undergraduates to study these subjects in universities. Are we nuts?

We’re producing graduates who far from being Renaissance scholars wouldn’t be able to figure out a problem posed by a Renaissance mathematician. A university system that allows people to indulge in academic entertainment and then awards them a degree doesn’t deserve public money. A free Sudoku booklet for school leavers would be a better use of our taxes.

So what should we do about it? The employment market has already discounted degrees that aren’t relevant to business. Male arts graduates can expect to be worse off over their lifetime after paying for the kind of knowledge the economy doesn’t care about.

Do we really need another government consultation or initiative for this to sink in? Or do we need prospective students to wake up and smell the coffee on job prospects before they end up brewing it for a living?

I’m not suggesting that universities open faculties of barista studies or call centre etiquette. Far from it. Education in subjects that will boost the economy doesn’t need to mean students ordering from a menu provided by local employers, allowing them to outsource their training budgets to university departments.

Instead it means giving graduates the ability to excel in the kind of subjects that we know will feed an information-based, technology-driven global economy. We may not know with confidence exactly what those are, but we can be damn sure what they are not – liberal arts and humanities subjects.

If you don’t believe me, a history grad, then take the word of Netscape founder Marc Andreessen:

“Graduating with a technical degree is like heading out into the real world armed with an assault rifle instead of a dull knife. Don’t miss that opportunity because of some fuzzy romanticized view of liberal arts broadening your horizons.”

Andreessen is absolutely right. Even in a subject like mine – journalism – the future is being shaped by graduates like Adrian Holovaty, who have developed programming languages and websites that aggregate information in ways traditional news providers could never dream of.

And yet all too often universities are happy to play the game, piling on vocational-sounding courses whilst pandering to popular fads. In my area, journalism, there are more than 150 courses available for an industry that has precious few job openings.

If you think it’s just journalism, take a look at the CSI effect. Last year UCAS had nearly 250 Forensic Science courses on its books, with nearly 1,700 students enrolled. Will those graduates find work in a profession with just over 2,500 registered practitioners?

There are over 300 television studies courses. Combine that with forensic science and you just might qualify for a shovel on Time Team.

I’m not suggesting we shut down English departments and Forensic Science degrees en masse. Let them flourish if they provide an opportunity to study as a leisure activity.

The growth of genealogy demonstrates the public appetite for recreational learning in areas that universities barely support. By all means let people study history, the classics, novels, the media. But let them do it in their spare time – not as a state sponsored, loan-financed languor.

When mathematics, which underpins almost every achievement in our civilization, comes twentieth in the most popular subjects at university, you can see how Renaissance scholars might look at us with something like disgust.

If we really want to maintain and improve our position in the world we need to educate more technically skilled graduates, and send out into the world economy more people able to see sophisticated opportunities and take advantage of them, both intellectually and commercially.