*her
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thanks. corrected.
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Vocational training in a STEM field is not on offer at most top-ranked universities, outside of engineering. Instead you have traditional liberal arts like biology, chemistry, math, and physics. Engineering is really its own beast. Computer science could be considered an honorary liberal art since it originally grew out of math departments. Just as data science today is being born out of collaboration among math, stats, and cs departments.
What is not a traditional liberal arts field? I would argue any of the “Studies” majors. A traditional approach would be to study history (or literature or whatever method/discipline) and apply it to America or Africa, rather than call “American Studies” or “African Studies” something different. But the Studies have all evolved their own approaches, and have been more or sometimes less accepted as “new” liberal arts disciplines.
The “Studies” are absolutely accepted as liberal arts interdisciplinary areas, because they incorporate the methodologies and literatures of long-established disciplines, putting these disciplines in conversation with each other. This is in keeping with the liberal arts ideal, which promotes a broad exploration of the disciplines. Areas of study that are not included in the liberal arts are vocational or pre-professional fields (for example, math is included, but not accounting; biology is included but not health training programs like physical therapy or nursing; English is included, but not communications or teacher education).
Edit to clarify: a college or university that includes applied or pre-professional fields can still be a liberal arts institution, which may be why the category seems a bit ill-defined. Most universities are probably hybrids of liberal arts and vocational models. The question is where the curricular focus lies, along with the institution’s underlying educational philosophy and historical roots.
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The area, ethnic, etc. “studies” majors categorize areas of study differently, but do not fall outside of liberal arts if the type of studies focused on the area, ethnic, etc. are liberal arts. For example, “American studies” may include study of the history, sociology, political science, economics, art, and literature of the Americas, rather than just history or just sociology etc. of the Americas.
Of course, many students choose liberal arts majors for pre-professional reasons, and many departments accommodate them. Consider finance-focused courses in economics, math, or statistics departments, for example. Art and music can be pre-professional, even if the profession is difficult to make a living in for many.
As far as I’m concerned, this thread is about defining “liberal arts”, not about how valuable a “liberal arts” education is. If one reads this entire thread, it’s fairly clear that some posters think that any questions about “liberal arts” are attacks on one component of “liberal arts”, namely the humanities. Somehow they equate “liberal arts” with the humanities.
Let’s not forget that math and sciences are also part of the traditional “liberal arts”. Math is the most rigorous of all disciplines. Everything has to be proven to the satisfaction of everyone in the field. In physics, another subject in traditional “liberal arts”, everything needs to be verified to the nth degree before it can be regarded as the truth. Some physicists are still testing Einstein’s theory of general relativity, hoping to find the minutest of discrepancies in their search for the “greater” truth. No one is saying math or physics is “too wishy-washy. Too amorphous. Too ill-defined. Too complicated. Too contradictory. Too subjective”.
The reason I ask you to define it is because you seem to use the term as the opposite of “liberal arts”. If that’s the case and you can define “vocation STEM”, perhaps we’ll have your version of “liberal arts”.
It is probably a failure of communication on my part, but this response reminds me of the one above which written by the AI bot, in that it doesn’t really seem to have much to do with the post to which you were responding.
It has been repeatedly explained and defined. You just don’t accept it. 
I haven’t forgotten what disciplines are traditionally included in the liberal arts approach.
Cool.
Really? No one criticizes physicists regarding the origins of the universe, for example? This is where a broader understanding of the history might help inform us about how criticisms have been leveled against the sciences since forever and are continuing today.
More to the point, many are uncomfortable with the Liberal Arts approach precisely because they don’t think ‘worthy’ fields like Math and Physics ought to be thrown in with the ones they consider too “wishy-washy,” like History, Social Sciences, and the Humanities. Wasn’t that your point in the passage I quoted?
This is a good example of trying to shoehorn this discussion into a mode of thinking for which it may be unsuited. I’ve already defined it, and I don’t view Liberal Arts as having an “opposite” in the sense you are suggesting. This isn’t math.
Not sure what point you are trying to make. Is it that we should adapt a definition of “liberal arts” that places everything on a continuum from “wishy-washy” to “non-wishy-washy”? I’m all in favor of whatever helps you to understand.
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Perhaps Dr Who can help us understand since he figured out the space time continuum, wibbly-wobbly, timey-whimey stuff.
Hope you don’t mind my sidestep for a bit of humor. Back to regularly scheduled programming.
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Thank you. You’ve reminded me that it’s time to take my meds.
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That time has long since passed😀
Ba-dump-bump. Mic drop. 
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This and that is the ideal mix. I think I have expressed a preference (certainly in advocating to the kids early in high school) to pick something for a major that has tangible skills embedded in the mix, and then study broadly in the space provided elsewhere in the requirements. To do it in 4 years rather than in 6 years. The cost of education these days is prohibitively high – 4 years are cheaper than 6 years. The two years of MBA these days has an all in cost of 500-600k, including opportunity cost. To do a 4 +2 is a luxury few can afford. It is not even guaranteed that one can get into an MBA program of your choice that will ensure well paid employment after that. I have known MBAs (from my school) that took up jobs as produce managers at a local grocery chain. Often it is the relatively less informed, coming from relatively poor backgrounds kids that make poor choices in colleges and do a studies major or a history major. If a rich kid wants to go and study history that is their choice. The family can afford another two years of professional grad school. It really bothers me that colleges encourage kids down paths that are not viable for the kids’ long term economic well being. I told my kids that if they got into a top school, they could study whatever they wanted. If they got into a less than T5, they need to do something more visibly (to an employer) useful. As such, my STEM kid has 90% of his transcript that he claims is not useful. This includes courses like high dimensional probability (not useful to most employers) and american film. I told him I don’t care – he doesn’t need to tell me – although I am curious what he is doing each semester, and we talk about stuff.
I wouldn’t assume “business” means higher starting salary. Accounting and, depending on the school, finance, sure, probably.
But even at a solid school like UW’s Foster, a lot of those kids find employment as “account executives” at Amazon, selling real estate or pushing retail investments at a TD Ameritrade branch, all of which can be filled with a history major.
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Curious to know how many people from poor backgrounds you actually know who majored in history in college?
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I don’t know of any. What does that have to do with anything?
I do know kids that are low SES, and they are relatively less exposed to many things related to careers, jobs, opportunities, different educational paths etc.
I’ve attempted to help them, but find it difficult because I don’t even know where to start. There is often a large gulf.
There are more certain paths through life and less certain paths.
Some individuals have greater capacity to handle uncertainty and some less, the capacity partly arising from financial security, and partly their nature/personality among others.
Thank you.
I don’t know any field studied in college that doesn’t involve different “modes of thinking” or “many ways to think”. Do you? If not, would you consider all of them “liberal arts”? On the other hand, if you think some of them don’t involve “many ways to think” or too black-and-white, or whatever other adjective you wish to use to describe them, could you name them?
Not really. I consider all those fields you listed worthy of studies and I never said anything negative about the humanities. My point in the passage you quoted was to point out that traditional “liberal arts” contain disciplines that can’t be described by those adjectives you used, which brings us back to the question of how to consistently describe/define/delineate “liberal arts”.
For the rest of us who don’t remember what adjectives you’re talking about, would you repeat them? Thanking you in advance.
I don’t think anybody is going to come up with a sufficiently specific and encompassing definition to put this to bed. I have found this particular subject to be a bit unwieldy, and when it’s brought up even on CC, the one place I can think of with enough of us nerdy people who bother to try and solve the riddle, it gets nowhere.
I think of it in extremes and accept that it’s not a math proof. On the one end, if you’re taking classes that are trade or exceedingly professional in nature, you’re not in a liberal arts course. If you’re in a trade school learning how to fix something or at CC preparing to get your real estate license or in a prep course for your Series 7 (or whatever they call it now), you’re not in a liberal arts environment. If you’re taking a course on the philosophy of aesthetics, you most certainly are. There is obviously a gulf in between those two end points. I have taken many accounting courses. You have to think, and it’s not ‘easy’ for most people. But it is narrow in scope and probably not what the academic gods had in mind when they coined the phrase “life of the mind.” You may have another view.
Same goes with Liberal Arts Colleges. You know it when you see it. Wesleyan is a LAC, even though it uses the word “University” in its name, and even though, like a handful of other LACs, they offer some small and limited graduate programs. The overall defining characteristics of a LAC is its focus on undergraduate learning, lack of professional studies and typically its small size.
But I don’t know what to do with W&L, which as stated by another poster, has a law school, or Skidmore, which offers a business studies curriculum that includes some limited accounting coursework. And most LACs offer CS; I don’t know what to do with that either. And I don’t have a pithy response for the favorite assertion by one CC poster that the Arts & Sciences department of any university is a LAC. Sure, that department seems like a LAC in its content, but the context of the larger university makes it something else. Not better or worse, just different. I was in the Arts & Sciences at a large research powerhouse, and I don’t think my experience was comparable to that of my children who attended LACs. I don’t think it was comparable to my kid’s experience who’s attending Brown, either.
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