“… my advice is to let your child know that a liberal-arts degree can be a great launching pad for a career in just about any industry. Majoring in philosophy, history or English literature will not consign a graduate to a fate of perpetual unemployment. Far from it. I say this as a trained classicist—yes, you can still study ancient Greek and Latin—who decided to make a transition into the tech world.” …
Opinion.
Thanks for the link! Couldn’t agree more!
Thanks for posting this. Parents want a quick and certain return on investment and kids are asked throughout their teens and even earlier, what they “want to be.” The old-fashioned idea that college is for the" life of the mind", with wide reading, research and writing in a variety of areas, seems to be dying with the financial pressures of tuitions and loans. The irony is that in the long run, an English major may do better than a business major, but there will be no early certainty of path. Staying open to opportunities rather than planning prematurely is a scary thing. But rewarding.
A century ago, college was probably mostly for the scions of the SES elite, who had their tuition paid with parental money and no immediate need to find a job at graduation. A half century ago, the expansion of inexpensive state universities made college accessible to many with relatively low financial pressure, and college graduates in any major were seen as being more desirable than the baseline job applicant (but many jobs did not require a bachelor’s degree).
Now, a bachelor’s degree is seen as the minimum baseline for many jobs (regardless of whether major-specific skills and knowledge or general skills signaled by the bachelor’s degree are actually needed for the job), but college is more expensive than it used to be. I.e. college is becoming more mandatory for a wider range of jobs, but is becoming more financially burdensome to more people, so the concern about pre-professional preparation is higher now than before.
Yep. For most of Harvard’s history, I believe tuition cost less than room and board, and room and board was very bare bones.
With those costs, of course it is easier to consider studies that would not pay off soon (or ever at all).
With full-price private school and OOS costs approaching 300K as well as student loan debt ever expanding, studying areas that do not have a high and quick payoff is quick becoming a luxury of the upper/upper-middle-class.
Now, free tuition for all may allow more to study the liberal arts, but it seems that the German model isn’t in much favor on CC (even among those who are strongly in favor of studying the liberal arts).
Liberal arts is great. Produces well spoken critical thinkers. Very important in the work force. However, a big challenge remains within the university / LAC apparatus to connect these kids with good jobs right out of college (as opposed to grad school - which is great but not for everyone). The stigma still exists that a LA degree will lead to academia or “what are you going to do with that?” Certainly the top LACs are feeders for wall street and consulting but not once you get past the top 25 or so.
It would be great if a kid could tell his parents he wanted to go to X school for an English degree (or sociolgy, psych, anthro, hist, etc) and receive support because mom and dad knew s/he would still graduate with a start to a promising career. I know that’s the goal of pre professional programs.
The US needs less liberal arts majors!
We need more STEM students who can graduate to become mathematitions, chemists, physicists, biologists, astrophysicists, and biologists.
Edit to clarify: It’s a joke. Mathematics and the physical sciences ARE liberal arts.
Is there a link to the article that’s not behind a paywall?
Never mind, I found one.
Some of the best courses I took were the ones that seemed the least practical. By “best” I mean, most interesting and eye opening at the time, the courses that someone said: it would be so cool if you took X course with me. And then I took the plunge. And later, these are the same ones I return to in my mind for new angles of thinking, to solve practical problems today.
Hard sciences are great. I think of them as the concrete structure that holds everything together. Liberal Arts are the “everything” that finds its place in the structure. You need both. Interesting that many of today’s pressing issues (i.e gun control, immigration , trade pacts, and even the economic effect of going green) are far more liberal arts than hard science topics. We need people inventing and creating the next new things for sure. We also need people to figure out how to use them to benefit society.
Your major matters for employment. There’s been enough research on this, it shouldn’t even be up for debate. The situation might be different for a philosophy major at an Ivy or top LAC, but that’s not 98% of college students.
I don’t know. I read craigslist and other job postings, including those focused on what I might call “cultural jobs,” and there are plenty of jobs out there for liberal arts majors.
I do think colleges need to do a better job in their career offices with these students.
Liberal arts jobs won’t be replaced by robots.
^I beg to differ. If AI fulfills it’s promise, it will replace a lot of liberal arts jobs. Look at law firms for a start.
I am a big defender of the liberal arts major, but I also think there is a valid argument that the exceptionally high cost of education undermines the ability for a “non-professional” degree to be as wise as before. Whether you are on ample financial aid but still borrow tens of thousands of dollars, or else are “rich” enough to pay $300k out of pocket, a student today is in a far different place than their grandparent was when s/he could work each summer to pay their tuition for the next year.
Regardless of the major, get good summer experiences and I think a student will be fine. One needs a degree and a resume showing some work experience.
When I think about the most financially successful people I personally know, they are all liberal arts types.
I’m confused about what you all mean by “liberal arts.” Do you mean humanities majors? Cuz I know at my school, physics, chem, bio, neuro, math etc are all liberal arts majors whereas education is not.
The article would have been a lot stronger if the author had actually shared his career path and how he turned a degree in classics into his current career.
A lot of times, the answer is "grad school " or “family connections” which not every student has access to.
Odd that the author uses "liberal arts’ but seems to mean “arts and humanities” because all the examples are about writing, critical thinking, philosophy, etc.
Of course math and science are liberal arts.
And FWIW when I want to read a WSJ article I search for it on Facebook. If you click the link from FB then you can read it all.