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The author has no clue about the job market.

You go to school to get a marketable degree - a degree that gives you the best chance of getting employed right out of college.

But as he talks about our younger generations of students, he fails to mention the fact that many of today's college graduates will change jobs and careers multiple times throughout their lives. In fact, some will find themselves in jobs that don't yet exist.

Tell THAT to the recruiters who come to that college - oh wait:

Gettysburg College - A four year "affordable" Liberal Arts College - i.e. Four years of wasted time and money - a worthless Degree.

Don't forget these:

http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~marschal/clea/CLEAhome.html - If you have smart 8th graders, they can do simulated astronomy and learn how we know some of the things we know

Stellarium and Skycharts (Cartes du Ceil) are among the best sky simulation and mapping software and well worth a look along with Stellarium. Or try Kstars on Linux
http://www.stellarium.org/
http://www.ap-i.net/skychart/en/download (newer more comprehensive
http://www.stargazing.net/astropc/oldversion/index.html - Version 2 (older, easier on the PC)

NASA World Wind
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/java/

Hubble for pretty pictures and the stories behind them
http://hubblesite.org/

If they don't mind math try a gravity simulator
http://www.orbitsimulator.com/gravity/articles/what.html

Various Roller Coaster Simulators

Rasmol Molecule simulator
http://rasmol.org/
http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/

Scorched Earth style artillery games may get their imagination fired (but be careful as political correctness may mean you're fired)

Much more. No time to post right now though.
http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/

"Prove that it isn't. There is no science to prove that it's anything but a behavior decision."
Proof is a bitch but a preponderance of evidence is not.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals
2. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0510_050510_gayscent.html
3. http://public.gettysburg.edu/~bmeier/Publications/Meier,%20Robinson,%20Gaither,%20&%20Heinert%20(2006)%20-%20Homophobia.pdf
You sir, are a fucking moron. In addition you are probably are a coward you can't take the basic fact that you love cock.

"By your argument, everyone should hire people who don't conform to standards they set (moral or otherwise) despite espousing those standards for themselves."
He didn't argue a fucking thing, he asked you a god damn question, which like any cock-smoking, hypocritical, coward, didn't bother to consider answering, and then tried to misdirect. Oxford debate club material you sir are not.

"By your argument, everyone should hire people who don't conform to standards they set (moral or otherwise) despite espousing those standards for themselves."
No he's saying if something does effect job performance, doesn't predict future performance, and is a private activity it shouldn't be used to determine employment. Your example is shit because it makes the focus of the job the point of contention. You of course can hire and fire based on pertinent aspects of a job. I'm not going to hire a flat chested heroine chic punk rocker to work at a Hooters. If you claim, at all, to believe in freedom and liberty, which a fascist, dominionist, hypocrite like your self probably doesn't, then feel free to be a dick and think that only you are right and everyone who doesn't think as you do can starve.

Here's a simplified Michelson-Morley interferometer experiment
http://tonic.physics.sunysb.edu/~dteaney/F07_modern/lectures/mlab1_michelson.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson-Morley_experiment
http://www.wikinfo.org/index.php/Michelson-Morley_experiment

How about building your own Radio Telescope
http://www.radiotelescopebuilder.com/

For that matter you could get them to build their own Dobsonian although the physics there isn't too hard (basic optics), especially if you don't hand figure the mirror. There's also a large metalwork or woodwork component that might not be considered relevant.

Here are some really good astronomy tutorials (though the prac work is done with simulated software). You might be able to modify them to something more practical
http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~marschal/clea/CLEAhome.html

Some of the topics covered by the above
Radio Astronomy of Pulsars
Astrometry of Asteroids
The Revolution of the Moons of Jupiter
The Rotation of Mercury by The Doppler Effect
Photoelectric Photometry of the Pleiades
Spectral Classification of Stars
The Hubble RedShift-Distance Relation
The Flow of Energy Out of the Sun
The Quest for Object X
Jupiter's Moons and the Speed of Light: The Classic Roemer Experiment

There are books and web pages out there....many tend to be geared to highschool, then there are some that would require you to up your insurance...so you'll have to sift through them

http://physics.about.com/od/physicsexperiments/tp/experimentbooks.htm
http://www.educypedia.be/education/physicsexperiments.htm

CS majors are a dime a dozen, from tech schools or liberal arts colleges. You need something to set you apart from the crowd, and doing a serious undergrad research project is one of the absolute best ways to do it. You get huge benefits all the way around

1. A recommendation letter from someone who actually knows your skills, not just a "Yea, he got an A in my course"
2. A chance to show employers that you can work on a single, difficult project for an extended time, not just YA compiler for CS323.
3. A chance to show that you can adapt and learn on a project where the final answer may not be known.
4. A chance to show that you can communicate effectively with other people, both written and oral.

Ask what the majors in your field have done for senior projects. Do they sound interesting? Are the seniors enthusiastic about them? Ask how many *undergrad* students there are per professor working on research. (The ideal answer here is less than 5, with no grad students, but you'll only get that at a small liberal arts college.)

One of the recently faculty lunches here was given by a CS professor and his student- they developed a program over the summer to solve the 1-die per player/2 player version of Dudo. How many undergrads get to give a talk that a bunch of faculty members listen to avidly? (It was the best talk I've seen this year)

*That's* what gets you a good job.

I attended a talk by Sharon Stephenson on women in physics. She said that in Japan, there is a significant rise in productive publication from middle-aged female researchers. It was due to two factors: the fact that their children grew up, and the fact that sexism kept them off of many committees and such. Both factors conspired to give them a lot of free time to research.