why foreign language in college?

MOst colleges in the USA have a 'foreign language requirement' as part of their General Education requirements (especially for humanities-oriented majors). Is that a reasonable requirement? SHould college students be required to study Spanish or French (etc) as part of their college education? Why? WHy not? WHat's the benefit of it? WHat are the drawbacks? I would like to hear opinions of students, teachers, and administration.

my first post

hello! 'linguaphilos' (friends of language').
This is a space for open discussion on language(s)-related issues. Language is part of our everyday lives. We can't go a day without it. This humam-unique complex communication tool may be used for many purposes: express feelings, ideas, manipulate, convince, lead, deceive, teach, etc, etc.
I would like for all the people friends of this blog site to post thoughts about this. Try to make it everyday life-relevant.
SOme ideas:
-little words or expressions may tell you A LOT about a person's personality & worldview. Give me examples of those.
-give me some examples of language being used for negative purposes: deceive, distort, offend..
-I am also interested in miscommunication incidents and the possible causes of those.
-invention of new words, expressions
-opinions, attitudes, ideas about dialects, others' languages (Spanish, French, Arabic, Nahuatl..)
-exples of 'correct' or 'incorrect' English (or any other language). What does that show?
-ambiguous words, expressions
-anything that you would like to post that is language-related and interesting