Over the next few months, in homes across America, seventeen and eighteen-year-olds will be conferring with one another and with their parents about a life changing decision: What college to go to! After months of research, visits, and advice from "experts," these young men and women must now decide: Where will I be happy? Where will I make friends? Where will I get an education I can afford now, and an education that will remain valuable for years after graduation?
In this same time period, our government officials will be deciding where an investment in America's economic infrastructure will do the most good. Commentators from different political perspectives have often noted that one of the great advantages of America is its peerless higher education system. Although other sectors have diminished international roles, higher education in this country continues to inspire admiration around the globe. When politicians talk about this, they often emphasize the research output of large universities, but the focus should also be on American undergraduate liberal arts education. Liberal arts in the USA provide not only a pipeline of talented and prepared students to the great graduate schools, but also a model for life-long learning that other countries are beginning to emulate.
But in these challenging times, what's an education in the liberal arts good for?
Rather than pursuing business, technical or vocational training, some students (and their families) opt for a well-rounded learning experience. Liberal learning introduces them to books and the music, the science and the philosophy that form disciplined yet creative habits of mind that are not reducible to the material circumstances of one's life (though they may depend on those circumstances). There is a promise of freedom in the liberal arts education offered by America's most distinctive, selective, and demanding institutions; and it is no surprise that their graduates can be found disproportionately in leadership positions in politics, culture and the economy. A quick look at several members of President-elect Obama's leadership team can stand as an example of how those with a liberal arts education are shaping the future of our society.
What does liberal learning have to do with the harsh realities that our graduates are going to face after college? The development of the capacities for critical inquiry associated with liberal learning can be enormously practical because they become resources on which to draw for continual learning, for making decisions in one's life, and for making a difference in the world. Given the pace of technological and social change, it no longer makes sense to devote four years of higher education entirely to specific skills. Being ready on DAY ONE, may have sounded nice on the campaign trail, but being able to draw on one's education over a lifetime is much more practical (and precious). Post secondary education should help students to discover what they love to do, to get better at it, and to develop the ability to continue learning so that they become agents of change -- not victims of it.
A successful liberal arts education develops the capacity for innovation and for judgment. Those who can image how best to reconfigure existing resources and project future results will be the shapers of our economy and culture. We seldom get to have all the information we would like, but still we must act. The habits of mind developed in a liberal arts context often result in combinations of focus and flexibility that make for intelligent, and sometimes courageous risk taking for critical assessment of those risks.
The possibilities for free study, experimentation and risk taking need protection and cultivation. Looking around the world, we find no shortage of thugs who desecrate or murder those who seek to produce a more meaningful culture. And here at home we can easily see how mindless indifference to the contemporary arts and sciences facilitates the destruction of cultural memory and creative potential.
America's great universities and colleges must continue to offer a rigorous and innovative liberal arts education. A liberal education remains a resource years after graduation because it helps us to address problems and potential in our lives with passion, commitment and a sense of possibility. A liberal education teaches freedom by example, through the experience of free research, thinking and expression; and ideally, it inspires us to carry this example, this experience of meaningful freedom, from campus to community.
The American model of liberal arts education emphasizes freedom and experimentation as tools for students to develop meaningful ways of working after graduation. Many liberal arts students become innovators and productive risk takers, translating liberal arts ideals into effective, productive work in the world. That is what a liberal education is good for.
We were surprised last week to hear reports from several liberal arts colleges and universities that they had seen significant increases in 'early decision' applications. At Wesleyan, we were up almost 40%, an increase none of us on the staff would have predicted. Early decision applicants have already decided that if they are accepted at the one school to which they apply in the fall, they will attend that school the following year. Many of the highly selective schools like Wesleyan have robust financial aid programs, accepting students regardless of their ability to pay. In my next post, I'll write more about issues of affordability even with financial aid.
In these turbulent economic times, it appears that students want to know as quickly as possible if they are going to be able to attend their first choice school. Many of our talented high school seniors are doubtless deciding that the significant investment of time and money in a liberal arts education will give them the capacity for a sustainable and creative future. Perhaps they have something to teach us!
http://www.truthout.org/article/henry-giroux-rethinking-promise-critical-education
A liberal arts education is a hideous waste of time for nearly all those who get one. It prepares the graduate for absolutely nothing. If you emerge from 4 years of college with a degree and no one is recruiting you for a job, you just wasted 4 years of life, a lot of money and a whole lot of effort.
I know because I have a BA in English. The first job I got after college was as a carpet installer. It paid well but didn't make use of my knowledge of American Lit. Three years after college, I landed my first job which required a bachelor's degree. I became a reporter for the sum of $14,950 a year. It's a poverty wage now and was a poverty wage in 1990 too. It took me nearly 20 years in the newspaper business to earn barely over $40K a year, and I'm still starving. Literally.
I tell all my friends who have kids to do everything in their power to dissuade them from getting an English or other liberal arts degree. Study engineering, math, science, pharmacy, anything which will allow you to earn enough money to support a family, buy a house before you are 40 and to keep the fridge full. Women don't marry poor English majors, trust me. They marry engineers who have good jobs. Liberal Arts? Thanks for NOTHING!
If you want to know what I mean by a Shakesperean actor, just watch the Young and the Restless, which has Shakesperan actors, and then a soap opera like Guiding Light. The Y&R actors are much more dramatic!
employers do not care about your GPA, what your major was or what school you went to (unless its Harvard, Yale, Berkley, Georgetown). They care what you've done with it!
Plus, i hate to break it to everyone, but you do not need a degree in business to work in business!!! You cannot teach critical skills like how to get along with co-workers and management, how to sell products or concepts, those you learn from direct on the job training!
Employers do not care about your major, they care about experience. I say when you go to college, take classes in the subjects you love, and just an internship in the summer for the real world. School will be a much more enjoyable when you study subjects you love, you will emerge from your college career much more well rounded, and look more competitive than others!
PS: A major in Japanese, Chinese, Spanish (another liberal arts program) is incredibly useful in the business world these days, esp considering we are 90% owned by Asia.
So everyone, relax a little about this article and dont be so bitter!!
Let me suggest this off the cuff idea. Intellectual curiosity develops as a method of resolving personal shortcomings. It may or may not get channeled into a single discipline. My suspicion is that those whose early lives were smooth or successful had no motivation to question anything. On the other hand, many of those whose early lives were rough became motivated to learn more about themselves and the world about them in order to resolve and move ahead.
Any Master thesis candidates interested in following this one up?
Our culture also contributes to the deadening and concretizing of the American mind. Mindless entertainment and political debates between spinmeisters. Right-wingers have been putting down liberal arts education for years, believing that profs were all communists. They would prefer a dumbe-down citizenry who viewed intellectual curiosity with disdain and who thought their religion taught them everything they needed to know.
Let me suggest this off the cuff idea. Intellectual curiosity develops as a method of resolving personal shortcomings. It may or may not get channeled into a single discipline. My suspicion is that those whose early lives were smooth or successful had no motivation to question anything. On the other hand, many of those whose early lives were rough became motivated to learn more about themselves and the world about them in order to resolve and move ahead.
Any Master thesis candidates interested in following this one up?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/education/03college.html?_r=1&ref=education
We're going back to the days when only the elite get educated. Cost of college is up 436 percent from 1982 to 2007, while median family income is up only 142 percent.
Aim high, and hope your smart enough to get into a rich liberal arts college willing to fund you 100%. Everyone else can work at Walmart.
I have a niece with an undergrad degree in Sociology. Her father spent $100k to send her to university. She is working in a grocery store for $8/ hour. She has a donated car, can’t afford an apartment, groceries or an electric bill. She would be homeless, save for my generosity. (I am an Electrical Engineer. My wife has a business degree.)
Mr. Roth’s “critical thinking skills” don’t seem to be so well learned. Why not encourage kids to get viable degrees that can insure their success in our economy? Then, if they want a "well rounded education”, they can go back to school and study anything from brain surgery to basket weaving.
Sociology is a viable degree- but then again its what you else you do WHILE you are attaining your degree, and AFTER that counts (aka actually looking for a job- they're out there)
ps.. what is a viable degree anyway? and who are you to say any degree is more worthwhile or important to society than another. We need music and art and history and literature in our lives. We are not creatures who should solely slave all day from 8-7 to make other men rich while we get by.
Take the classes you love, intern in the real world. Thats how you get a job.
ps.. have you seen the differences in pay for a person who is fluent in a language like spanish, japanese, chinese, etc? That how you make more than the rest.
It's worse when you consider the many weak universities that many students now attend. The achievement level is so low that humanities students aren't even learning the reasoning/research skills that are supposed to come from the humanities. The result is they end up with a little bit of rote knowledge having little market value. A recent article in the "Chronicle of Higher Education" reported that many people completing degrees end up working in the same jobs they could have taken right out of high school. The science/professional people coming out of those same schools, while alsoalso weak, usually have some marketable knowledge/skills to get them in the door for jobs requiring more than a high school degree. A college degree isn't what it used to be in many cases and employers know it.