This statement has a significant grain of truth in it, but that doesn’t make it actually true. The teaching-degree requirement applies only in public schools, not in private or religious schools and some charters, which in some areas (including mine) combine to educate half or more of all students. And even in the world of public education, there are alternative-credentialling programs, the best-known of which is Teach For America, which place non-teaching-degree graduates in teaching jobs and give them a relatively easy way to earn the necessary degree while on the job. Through TFA, my daughter became a public school teacher in NYC in a year in which the city Department of Education hired no entry-level teachers with traditional teaching degrees. (Whether that’s a good thing or not is something worthy of debate, but the existence of the pathway is a matter of fact.) She earned a MAT from Fordham during her first year with a lot less work than it took to deal with her TFA mentors.
In California, it is common for secondary school teachers to have a liberal arts degree (English, math, history, etc.) in the subject that they teach and a teaching credential.
In other states, what is the expected education in the subject that secondary school teachers teach? I.e. can you teach English without an English major background, or teach math without a math major background?
Different schools have different ideas on what they require for H/SS courses. MIT and Harvey Mudd have extensive H/SS requirements for all students, while Brown has far fewer, for example. When the math and science are included along with H/SS, the minimum liberal arts content of an engineering degree program is usually around 40-45%.
I love Spaceship’s post! I’m a big proponent of the liberal arts but really value interdisciplinary study. The best of the pre-professional programs, like the one Spaceship describes, can be a highly fertile ground for studying the way numerous liberal arts disciplines intersect.
And @Spaceship, since you mentioned Dickens, here are a few more literary recommendations for a budding urban planner. Enjoy!
Paris Spleen, by Charles Baudelaire (especially Eyes of the Poor)
L’Assomoir, by Emile Zola
Notes from Underground, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Last Night of Paris, by Philippe Soupault
Manhattan Transfer, by John Dos Passos
Lush Life, by Richard Price
I’m skeptical about the idea that liberal arts is fading out.
Although purely liberal arts colleges are becoming less popular, schools are blending. Trade schools are implementing liberal arts curriculum, and liberal arts schools are implementing better career focus.
For example, Northeastern University, very much a career-oriented school, requires multiple English courses, a humanities, a cross-cultural course, a science course, a history, a political science, and a math for all students while increasingly encouraging interdisciplinary majors.
And Yale University, very much a liberal arts college, has begun to emphasize career services and internships while still maintaining a liberal arts curriculum.
It’s doesn’t seem all bad
Forbes has a completely different take on this on the site right now:
“That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2015/07/29/liberal-arts-degree-tech
I challenge this claim, and strongly.
This is based not only on things like the Forbes article that @OHMomof2 linked to, but also on the way that traditional liberal arts degrees teach adaptability rather than narrow specialization, which in a job market that changes as rapidly as the modern market does seems rather a necessity than a luxury.
(Also, I’m a bit disturbed that so many people seem to think that the liberal arts are entirely things like literature and history, while forgetting—or worse, not realizing—that the liberal arts also includes things like chemistry and biology.)
The article is nonsense. It’s about the decline of liberal arts colleges, not the decline of liberal arts. I just checked the Common Data Set for my alma mater, the University of Michigan. Over 60% of the bachelor’s degrees it conferred in 2013-2014 were in liberal arts majors. This includes some “STEM” fields like biological sciences, physical sciences, and math, but math and science have always been a core part of the liberal arts, properly understood. Unlike education or engineering, an undergraduate degree in math, physics, or molecular biology doesn’t give you a professional credential. And math & science represented only about 1/4 of the liberal arts degrees conferred by Michigan that year. Other popular areas of study included social sciences (14.2% of all bachelor’s degrees), psychology (10.2%), visual and performing arts (5.4%), foreign languages, literatures, and linguistics (4.3%), English (3.2%), history (2.2%), and area, ethnic, and gender studies (2.2%).
At many private research universities the percentage of liberal arts degrees is even higher. At Yale, for example, 90% of bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2013-2014 were in liberal arts majors. Only 5% were in engineering, 3% in computer and information sciences, and 1% apiece in architecture and natural resources. Liberal arts dominated with fields like social sciences (27% of all bachelor’s degrees), biological sciences (10%), interdisciplinary studies (8%), English (7%), history (7%), psychology (6%) and area, ethnic, and gender studies (6%) leading the pack.
Anyone who thinks you need to go to a liberal arts college to study liberal arts doesn’t know the first thing about American higher education. That hasn’t been true since some of the nation’s finest liberal arts colleges first began evolving into full-fledged universities. In making that transition, they didn’t abandon the liberal arts, which remain to this day at the very center of their educational mission. Harvard has very fine medical, law, business, and public policy schools, but Harvard College always has been, is today, and likely will forever remain first and foremost a school for undergraduate study of the liberal arts.
Did you see the article Japan is going less liberal arts and more business training.
Humm, I was about to post the story about Wharton that I keep for everything a discussion about the death of LAC or Liberal Arts curriculum shows its ugly head. In a way, it was good that Bluebayou beat me to it because I could address the rebuttal at the same time.
Years, two friends ended up in different school. One at a LAC and the other at one could be considered the pinnacle pre-professional schools. Obviously, the school is none other than Wharton and is the school that extolled the value of its “business” degree as … excellence in the liberal arts.
While I am not sure what UCB wants to underscore with his comment, but I will push the envelope. By the time, the two friends graduated, it was absolutely impossible to find any meaningful in the scope of the depth of the curriculum and the only salient difference was that the LAC offered a bit more opportunities in terms of REAL participation in research instituted and funding opportunities for summer pragmatic research.
Most of the discussions in the past have been based on a poor understanding of what liberal arts used to encompass and still do at … certain schools. It is just as hard to define a research university as Penn accurately as it is to define what a LAC truly is. One end of the spectrum you have schools such as Harvey Mudd, Claremont McKenna, or Reed and on the other end you also have schools such as the “in the news” Sweet Briar or whatever that Antioch is now!
The reality is that a number of LACs are delivering students who acquired tools that are extremely useful in todays’ marketplace, but that this is hardly universal. Some LACs are direct counterparts to Caltech, Penn, or perhaps Yale. Others are --unfortunately-- the counterparts of middling public schools and community colleges and hardly deserve the financial life support they beg for.
Regarding the business focus of the BS economics degree at UPenn Wharton, UPenn Wharton itself says that the BS economics degree emphasizes business at http://undergrad.wharton.upenn.edu/academics/bs-versus-ba/ :
Here is the BS economics major at UPenn Wharton:
http://undergrad.wharton.upenn.edu/flexible-curriculum/
Here are the BA economics and mathematical economics majors at UPenn A&S:
https://economics.sas.upenn.edu/undergraduate-program/economics-major/course-requirements
https://economics.sas.upenn.edu/undergraduate-program/mathematical-economics-major/course-requirements
Compare these to business and economics majors at most other schools that offer such majors.
To underscore ucb’s point in post #30, Wharton undergrads also declare a concentration (more or less the equivalent of a major within the Bachelor of Science in Economics program) which shapes a substantial part of their junior and senior year curriculum after they’ve completed the required “business fundamental” classes in their first two years. If you look at the list of concentrations, the overwhelming majority are pretty nuts-and-bolts, practical business/management/professional skills subjects, not at all “liberal arts”-like. However, Wharton emphasizes that up to 43% of a Wharton undergrad’s classes may be taken outside Wharton, at Penn’s other schools and colleges, so it’s possible–though certainly not required–to add a fairly substantial exposure to the liberal arts to Wharton’s focus on business. Wharton calls this “business plus.”
Here’s the list of Wharton undergrad concentrations:
However, this is not unique to Wharton, since business major programs at other schools have liberal arts prerequisites (e.g. economics, math, statistics) and have liberal arts general education requirements (e.g. all MIT undergraduates including course 15 business majors have to take about half of their credits in liberal arts general institute requirements, though overlap with major is allowed).
To be clear, my comparison was between the LAC offering and the BS at … Wharton. Not the BA at Penn.
See Years [ago], two friends ended up in different school. One at a LAC and the other at one could be considered the pinnacle pre-professional schools. Obviously, the school is none other than Wharton and is the school that extolled the value of its “business” degree as … excellence in the liberal arts.
While I am not sure what UCB wants to underscore with his comment, but I will push the envelope. By the time, the two friends graduated, it was absolutely impossible to find any meaningful [differences] in the scope of the depth of the curriculum and the only salient difference was that the LAC offered a bit more opportunities in terms of REAL participation in research instituted and funding opportunities for summer pragmatic research.
PS Added missing words. 
^ Similarly, at Michigan’s Ross School of Business, the entire first year of the undergrad BBA program is taken at some other school or college within the University, most often Literature, Science and the Arts (the undergrad liberal arts college), though some people do, e.g., engineering. It takes 120 credits to graduate from Ross, of which at least 58 credits must be in business and at least 54 credits (45%) must in the liberal arts, including a minimum of 9 credits apiece in at least 3 of the following 4 areas: humanities, social science, math & natural sciences, or fourth-term foreign language proficiency. So the minimum liberal arts requirements at Ross are actually slightly higher than the maximum liberal arts courses available to a Wharton undergrad on a standard course load; a strong dose of liberal arts is required at Ross, but optional at Wharton; and at least in principal, a Ross BBA candidate could take more than half of their credits in liberal arts (120 credits required total, minus 58 required in business subjects = 62 credits in liberal arts). Ross reports that 35% of their BBA candidates are currently pursuing dual degree programs (concurrently earning their BBA and a BA or BS in some other field) or pursuing minors in some other field outside the business school.
I wouldn’t question that a Wharton degree may be qualitatively different than a BSBA from the average state flagship in other ways. Certainly the student body and their level of academic ability is very different. However, I have wondered about how they promote the liberal arts classes and the coursework outside of Wharton as something uniquely different about Wharton.
I hire a lot of CPAs with accounting degrees from state flagships, and all of them in completing their degrees have taken at least 40% of their coursework outside of the business schools of their respective universities. Typically these courses are part of a “general education curriculum” and/or are required electives outside the business school, from the “Arts and Sciences” school of the university, and are almost exclusively from “liberal arts” subjects (science, mathematics, history, literature, etc.).
I would imagine the rigor of the liberal arts courses taken could be very different. But in terms of credit hours spent in liberal arts coursework versus business coursework (Wharton vs. state flagship), I don’t see a difference.
I have noted too that Wharton likes to promote it both ways. On one hand they tell you that you will be taking more liberal arts and less business coursework. Then they turn around and tell you that there is no reason to get a MBA once you have completed your undergrad at Wharton, because you have had all of the business education you are ever going to need.
The real distinction to make in this thread I think is the difference between taking introductory coursework in the liberal arts (freshman and sophomore level intro courses) versus more extensive coursework, generally for juniors and seniors, that is generally reserved for those majoring in a subject. Accountants and engineers are required to take the former but not the latter. Whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing is what the debate is really about. Not whether accountants and engineers study in the liberal arts at all, because clearly, they do.
Actually, some schools do require that out of major breadth course work include some more advanced courses.
This is also something I found odd. For universities with general education requirements, everyone is supposed to get a liberal arts education. The interview equates both liberal arts colleges and liberal arts majors with liberal arts education. I question whether a psychology major is getting a broader education than a chemical engineering major from the same university. Ultimately they’re both specializing.
Things are different at schools with open curricula. In this case I’d note that it’s pretty common for liberal arts students to have no exposure to the applied arts, while the converse isn’t nearly as common. That’s actually strange when you consider how omnipresent the applied arts are in everyday life.
I think that several things are being conflated here. As others have pointed out, oftentimes when people refer to the demise of the “liberal arts” what they are really referring to is either of two things: (1) the demise of “liberal arts colleges” or (2) the decline in the study of the humanities and/or the humanities and social sciences and majors such as English, history, literature, philosophy, sociology and anthropology, etc. which are considered to be “luxuries” in a society that is as focused on making money as ours.
The fact is that these days people tend to place greater value on the pursuit of STEM subjects over the study of the humanities as the former tend to provide a greater “return on investment” than the latter. Given the high cost of tuition, such a focus has unfortunately become practically a necessity, but, to my mind, a rather evil necessity and one with pretty drastic repercussions for our society.
Of course, it is a common misconception that all STEM majors have a high financial return on investment. The most popular STEM major is biology, which generally does not lead to highly paid jobs at the bachelor’s degree level (and only a small percentage get into medical or other professional school leading to highly paid jobs after that).
Remember also that “liberal arts” overlaps with “STEM” in the areas of math and science.