I would say that one of the more well-intended but arbitrary and ultimately unuseful requirements that universities in the United States and elsewhere have set forth is the demand that undergraduate applicants have several years of education in a foreign language. In the vast majority of cases does attendance in language classes in high school not actually determine well a student's use of a language, but even if it did, learning one of those beloved tongues of Europe transfers minimally into the repertoire of non-specialists and constitutes a significant opportunity cost in pedagogy.
I've met one person in my
entire life who has garnered a functional domination of a language
(Spanish) in high-school; his story is certainly an outlier and his
learning was not unaided by connections with his own Hispanic heritage.
Yet even if there were hundreds or thousands or millions American
children who left secondary school with an extra language, it would
still be a rough argument to justify the constant mandate to instruct
all, even the unwilling, at the expense of time usable in other
subjects.
Of course it should be equally clear
that in the English-speaking world, the teaching of foreign language as
late as the high-school level is more of a gesture of multiculturalism
and cosmopolitanism than and genuine effort to create polyglots; it
seems most teachers of language in secondary schools are not
sufficiently optimistic to think it probable that their several hundred
students a year gain more than marginally and temporary use of a
language taught. As it turns out, language classes and their
corresponding student clubs often end up as organizations for the casual
and idle celebration of other cultural traditions, not necessarily for
the bookish and devoted pursuit of language boot-camp necessary.
Now
it is indeed quite easy to teach children languages; most school
systems in the world do it with admirable success. All that is required
is an inception of instruction at an early age and constant incentives
to continue learn; both of which are absent from the United States. It
would be quite facile to provide the former; 5 year old can be taught a
language essentially only at the cost of the time used taken from other
courses. Children's immense capacity for language learning is well-known
and well proclaimed and not without reason; the early childhood period
is most ripe for a linguistic harvest and any serious program of
institutionalized language learning should start thence.
Nonetheless
the latter incentive is difficult to provide given simply the state of
the world. Certainly the United States is replete with personnel capable
of teaching the classic staples of the modern language department, but
outside of the brief sample of the student population wanting to perform
specific tasks specifically in one part of the world, the pay-offs for
language learning are minimal.
One likes to think that this globalized and internationalized world has made knowledge of a foreign language more necessary, but time seems to be better and better vested elsewhere. Translators have become abundant and the science of translation has rendered the language learning as dual-tiered and unequal: the small number of translators indeed have greater reasons to expand their linguistic knowledge, but most of the rest of the population has precipitously fewer due to the useful implementation of translation.
Additionally, the story of English diminishes the
benefits of language learning to nigh null for Anglophones: frankly in a
world with more and more universal English education, English speakers
have less and less reason to pick one of the many languages of the world
to learn. Because the incentives aiding English learning are so high,
the reasons for mastering other languages are far less for those who
already speak it.
The cultural cosmopolitan has become outrageously conservative when speaking about languages: it's fairly common for intellectuals to lament Americans' consistent refusal to learn other languages as a sign of the times and of the increasing stultification of every generation so integral to the common litany of conservative complaints. The custom has become to celebrate polyglottery for its own sake rather than for its past usefulness.
Still, one need not hold any doubt that a job applicant who can actually speak other languages will be more likely to secure a post and impress his employers, but his skills have nonetheless become less profound now. In a sense, language learning remains a source of social differentiation and an expression of higher intelligence and dedication, but so is memorizing pi to the 1,500 decimal place. Indeed it pains people to admit that while foreigners must slave over the ridiculous aspects of English (do support, ablaut, the atrocious orthography) English speakers have little to no rationale to learn another language; it sounds a bit imperialist, no doubt.
Let us also remember that we mostly teach in the United States the languages which are most useless to students. For those planning to deal in international business, one would think that usage of a native language of a strongly developing country would be of considerable use. Such countries typically lack widespread English education and thus learning the accompanying language would be of considerable importance whether it be Chinese, Indonesian, Korean, Farsi, or Arabic. Needless to say, language pedagogy is dominated by European colors and students can usually only hope to have a choice between Spanish, German, French and Italian; although Spanish still yields a continent of speakers, the latter three yield small European populations more and more inundated with that mastery of English which makes learning their tongues redundant.