The Death of Liberal Arts?

College Majors
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<p>For those who say that employers want specific skills, that is only a small subset of employers. Outside of business, medical, computer, technical programs, and law degrees there are very few specific majors that are going to lead directly to a career. Employers like new employees who can think critically and adapt to new situations. </p>

<p>Tell me, what kind of degrees do you think most people in the government have? Administrators? Teachers? Librarians? People that work at banks? Work in NGOs? (You get my point.) Most of them do not have specific majors. The truth is, the majority of American jobs do not require a specific skill set learned in college. They require that you think critically and can adapt to new situations. That is why we still need LA degrees.</p>

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<p>In some jobs the best skill to the be able to write persuasively and clearly. In others it will be the ability to analyze data and manipulate numbers, or to understand how people will react in a given situation.</p>

<p>None of these things are specific at all… Of course some careers such as medicine, law, IT do require specialist knowledge of one field but on the whole employers do not look for a highly developed knowledge of one field but rather the skills that one had used to acquire and understand their field. In a Liberal Arts education all of the different “learning” skills that one needs are utilized.</p>

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<p>Education is good. So is training.</p>

<p>American universities provide both education and training in great variety and with enough freedom of choice that students often make very poor and costly choices.</p>

<p>I wouldn’t like to see this freedom of choice curtailed but I often think that there are way too many college students in the US drifting through a haphazard series of courses that they are not suited for or not really interested in. If economic scarcity forces students and their families to make better choices it will be a silver lining to the present financial difficulties of colleges and universities.</p>

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<p>Tell me if this is mere mythology. A couple years ago, I read that the military was beginning to embed anthropologists with its ground forces in Afghanistan to help the troops make informed strategic decisions that would comprise win-win scenarios for both them and the existing leaders of the areas they occupy. My first thought was “that’s great.” Then my next thought was horrific - “you mean we’ve been in there for years without equipping our troops with the insight they need to gain local cooperation?!”</p>

<p>National Public Radio, in a story titled “In Class, Marines Learn Cultural Cost Of Conflict” (09 January 2010), gave a description of the process:</p>

<p>"The students in front of Paula Holmes-Eber wear camouflage and have close-cropped hair. Most of them are Marine officers, and many of them have already been to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’re here to learn the consequences of their actions.</p>

<p>“‘Should we change another culture?’ she asks the class. ‘The reality is, the second you land on the ground with 100,000 troops eating and using the materials of the area, you’ve changed the economy; you’ve changed the environment.’</p>

<p>“‘It’s not should we,’ she tells them, ‘it’s what are we doing—and is that what we want to be doing?’</p>

<p>"An anthropologist, Holmes-Eber trains American warriors to be sensitive to other cultures. She teaches operational culture at Marine Corps University in Quantico, Va. It’s her job to get soldiers to think through how every move they make on the battlefield has a consequence—not just for enemy forces, but for ordinary people.</p>

<p>"Given the ‘bloody, horrible, protracted’ history of conflict in Afghanistan, Holmes-Eber would like to see American troops in the region take a different path—and that means understanding local culture well enough to build cooperative relationships.</p>

<p>“‘The goal is mission effectiveness,’ she explains. 'If they fail because they don’t understand the culture, then they didn’t do what we asked them to do. So it’s not about being touchy-feely and sweet and ‘don’t we like the natives.’ '</p>

<p>“‘I really hope that we don’t kill as many people this way.’”</p>

<p>Not mythology - more like life and death.</p>

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<p>Don’t let it die. God knows I don’t need any more of those liberal arts types going after my jobs.</p>

<p>On the other hand, they’ll decrease the mean… nevermind, carry on with the dying.</p>

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<p>To the idea of practicality and having Liberal Arts Degrees only for those wanting to continue post undergraduate studies (collegebound_guy): </p>

<p>So we are suggesting that people stop learning about anything other than what they are going to do in the workforce, except those that are going to rise to the top of the educational fields through graduated studies?</p>

<p>I like that. We subjugate all of the lower people into jobs of practical function, allowing those with more means and intelligence to develop into the managers, lawyers, and generally leaders of society. Then we can have a system of practical workers who duly preform a job, and a higher class of intellectuals who direct them. We wouldn’t even have to worry about the economic woes we are currently experiencing because the supply of workers would allow wages to be lowered and eventually everything would level out.</p>

<p>When should we start lobotomies?</p>

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<p>^ Wouldn’t law be a liberal arts degree? (Or am I misreading?)</p>

<p>And most of the managers I know have liberal arts college degrees. Go figure lol.</p>

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<p>I had a manager with a business degree, a manager with a history degree… I think if anything this just makes the idea of a degree seem silly to me. The guy with a history degree got to be a manager because of his work experience, not because of what he learned paying a lot of money to get a piece of paper.</p>

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<p>Romanigypsyeyes</p>

<p>I think you misread</p>

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<p>I’d say that he got it because of what he could do, which is the goal to which degrees are just a means.</p>

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<p>Who says more practical majors don’t develop skills usually attributed to liberal arts majors?</p>

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<p>I believe the premise of the article is wrong. The recession and unemployment are not the prime movers in the trend away from a liberal arts education. Even when the economy was healthy the trend was away from liberal studies. In early 2008 College Board announced it was discontinuing AP classes in Italian, Latin Literature and French Literature because enrollment for these tests had been dwindling. Liberal Arts core curricula have been disappearing for years in favor of roll-your-own distribution requirements.</p>

<p>Financial pressure has been at play for years as well with rapid increases in tuition and other college costs over the past 15 years. State budgets for funding higher education were strained in many states even before the recession hit and unemployment exploded. There is no mention of loans in the article. The increasing reliance upon loans to pay for college make securing a good job upon graduation more important that ever. It was in recognition of the heavy burden imposed by loans that some colleges and universities eliminated loans from their financial aid packages. Again, this is what was happening prior to 2008.</p>

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<p>@jamesGold - Me. I was an accounting major and I feel woefully under-educated. I got my accounting degree during the last big recession in 1982 and have regretted it ever since. Sure, I got a job right out of school, but I was a terrible accountant and it made for a stuttered start. I’ve also had to play a lot of auto-didactic catch-up. The economy will recover and once again there will be a place for the few that had the courage to get an anthropology, English lit, French or history degree.</p>

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<p>I like the debate going on in this post. =D</p>

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<p>We sort of do that now (not particularly deliberately). Not everyone goes to college. Not everyone has to go to college, of course, but that’s one way of social stratification; many jobs that do not actually require a Bachelor’s degree to be successful now demand a degree just to be considered for the position, not because people who don’t go to college are stupid or incapable of doing that job, but because there are so many applicants that they need some mechanism to weed out some of them.</p>

<p>Many people have to work jobs that have no room for advancement, because they simply aren’t lucky enough to advance. Hard work and social networking skills account for a lot, but sometimes you just don’t get ahead – either because you don’t need/want to or because you can’t for whatever reason. </p>

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<p>So would all sciences, actually. “Liberal arts” is an incredibly broad term, and can only reliably be used to define any major that doesn’t have a job named after it (ie accounting for accountants, engineering for engineers versus philosophy, biologist, or literature – there’s no defined job called “literatist” and how many job openings have you seen lately for a “biologist” or a “philosopher”). That’s not to say that these aren’t important, but saying that liberal arts – except for maybe a few of the really esoteric ones (like the ever-popular example, Underwater Basket-Weaving), it would be hard to say that we no longer need scientists, mathematicians, historians, etc. any more just because of this one recession. </p>

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<p>Yeah. You could argue that if he hadn’t had the degree (at all), his application to his original position might not have even been looked at, especially if he was hired during a time period of high unemployment and didn’t personally know the people in charged of hiring. Not because he needs a degree to do his job, of course! :D</p>

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<p>It’s more of a stereotype, the flipside of the people who say that liberal arts majors can’t get real jobs and will end up homeless / in debt. A lot of people tie your major in college too close to their personal identity. There is no reason for an accountant to be uninterested in literature. There is no need for a nurse to not be able to paint. There is no reason for an engineer not to know how to play the piano. What you study in college is only one facet of your personality. I’m not saying that this never happens, but you can’t possibly blame one program at one college for the problems in your life.</p>

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<p>I have a liberal arts undergrad and two different professional graduate degrees…I think the undergrad made me a lifelong lover of school. The grad degrees, which I paid for through fellowships and teaching, allowed me the financial freedom to continue to pursue what I studied in undergrad. Luxury.</p>

<p>H has a professional undergrad. He is more financially succesful than I am, than most are, to be frank, but he regrets it and wished he’d pursued a liberal arts undergrad and professional grad degree. </p>

<p>D is much more saavy than either of us. :wink: She is pursuing both a professional AND a liberal arts undergrad major at the same time. Live and learn. She is never bored or unchallenged. If possible, I think that might be the best way to go. fwiw</p>

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<p>When you hear about people who go to an ivy league school and end up unsucessful, 99% of the time they majored in english, anthropology classical languages, or something of the sort. I agree that these types of majors can be personally enriching, but they are useless in the end. They’re not called “twinkie studies” for nothing.</p>

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<p>I plan on majoring in either Psychology or Sociology as an undergrad, so I can go into grad school to major in either Counseling, Social School, or something along those lines.(Basically, human services.) I’m doing my undergrad in liberal arts because I love liberal arts, and many places hiring social workers will accept Sociology majors as well.</p>

<p>I guess it depends on what field, pay, etc. I know that if I just got a B.A. in Sociology and didn’t go to grad school, I could probably still score a job, but the pay is certainly not going to be good. But, I love liberal arts and I love to just study about different cultures, etc.</p>

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<p>I don’t understand why people say you need a humanities degree to learn to think critically. Wouldn’t math and science require much more critical thinking since they’re significantly more difficult subject areas?</p>

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<p>I wouldn’t necessarily consider a math or science degree to be much more difficult than an English degree. Still, math majors need to know critical thinking, and many companies need math majors. Regardless, math, English, philosophy, and most sciences are liberal arts areas.</p>