If you are about to graduate from high school and enter college this fall, well-meaning friends and relatives may advise you to major in some seemingly useful discipline with which you can get a job upon graduation -- like accounting or marketing.

But Chief Executive Officers of businesses and corporations urge quite otherwise: get a Liberal Arts degree, they say.

This somewhat astonishing news comes from a survey conducted by Hobart and William Smith Colleges, in Geneva, NY.

• Some 75 percent of parents and 85 percent of those in their college-ages believe the point of college is to get a practical education and land a job upon graduation.

• But only 37 percent of CEOs surveyed -- who seem to have been thinking of long-term career development -- said the purpose of a diploma is to acquire work skills.

• An overwhelming 90 percent of the CEOs said an education in the humanities was essential to acquiring critical thinking.

• Some 77 percent found value in liberal arts because those branches of knowledge impart the ability to solve problems.

Source: "Wanted: Liberal Arts Grads," Fortune, May 12, 1997.