Rationale behind teaching History in University I wrote an answer to this question regarding how economists evaluate a specific subject in a given curriculum.

Subjects which develop skills that have labour market significance are valuable to a curriculum from an economic perspective. However as an armchair economist I find it difficult to argue a for a reason why to teach a country's history or any world history at all if it has no labour market implications.

However we find that many high schools and universities require students to take electives in history. Why is this the case? 

Please provide sources for your reasoning.
To understand why some countries are rich and others are not, we need to understand what happened to each of them in the past. How and why they developed depends to a large extent on events that took place decades or even centuries ago. This is what economists broadly refer to as path dependence. Brian Arthur was probably one of the first economists to point that out in the late 1980's.

Recently this type of arguing was appreciated again by mainstream economics. There is a growing number of scholarly articles that show how and why some countries developed the way they did. With huge implication for future economic development. Two good summaries are Nunn - The Importance of Economic History for Economic Development and Nunn - Historical Development. So the conclusion would somewhat be like that one can't ignore history if she wants to understand why some countries are poor. And more generally why some things are the way they are (one prominent example was the somewhat random event of why we have a QWERTY keyboard system that is a lot slower than other potential alignments of letters on a keyboard. It was determined once by "luck" let's say, and we never switched back...)

So all in all I would argue that knowing (and potentially understanding) some history is essential to understanding how our world works. It's certainly nothing that you can sell as a key feature in your CV (like a specific programming skill), but knowing sufficient history would certainly alter anyone's view of the world. And in order to not repeat huge mistakes that were made in the past (as a "society"), we actually need to know what they were and how and why they came about.