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‘Harvard Thinking’: What skeptics get wrong about liberal arts

In podcast episode, an economist, an educator, and a philosopher make the case it’s as essential as ever in today’s job market

Samantha Laine Perfas

Harvard Staff Writer

What is the point of college? It’s a question that many families and potential students think about when it comes to deciding the role of higher education in the future. This question is particularly pressing for those considering a liberal arts education.

“Why should some young person waking up to the world in late adolescence subject themselves to an education of four years or so that expects them to study a range of topics?” asked Susanna Siegel , the Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy, in this episode of “Harvard Thinking.” One reason is that it prepares future generations to think for themselves and contribute to a democratic society.

But it’s not just about critical thinking. David Deming , the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy who co-leads the College-to-Jobs Initiative at the Kennedy School, said it also sets students up for success in a constantly evolving workplace.

“Precisely because it is general, when it’s well-executed, [a liberal arts education] is teaching you not a set of specific competencies in some specific thing, but rather giving you a set of tools to teach you how to think about the next problem over the horizon,” Deming said.

Nancy Hill , the Charles Bigelow Professor of Education and a Developmental Psychologist in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, agrees that the liberal arts can enhance a student’s learning. However, she’s also seen how it can be perceived as a luxury education rather than the standard. Universities and other institutions should work to make this type of education more accessible.

“There isn’t a sense of freedom to explore a liberal arts education when people are concerned about the economy,” Hill said. “For people who are first-gen and people from low-income backgrounds, I want them to come into any college … and feel confident in taking courses that broadly expose them to ideas.”

In this episode, host Samantha Laine Perfas talks with Siegel, Deming, and Hill about why a liberal arts education matters — and how to make it attractive again.

Nancy Hill: I think we haven’t made the liberal arts education attractive and innovated to make it attractive to people who are doing college in ways that we sometimes forget that that’s the majority of the ways in which people get their four-year degree. It’s overtime, it’s at night, it’s part-time. It’s almost as if the liberal arts education they’re experiencing is a luxury good, and we’re seeing it as an essential aspect of education.

Samantha Laine Perfas: The cost of college tuition is on the rise. Even with ramped-up financial aid efforts from universities, parents and students are still trying to decide whether or not tuition will lead to a smart return on their investment. Jobs increasingly require specific training or skill sets, leading some to question the value of a liberal arts education. Including fields like history, literature, and philosophy, the liberal arts have experienced diminishing enrollment numbers and institutions are trying to figure out their place in universities’ overall ecosystems.

So how do these institutions make a liberal arts education attractive again?

Welcome to Harvard Thinking, a podcast where the life of the mind meets everyday life. Today I’m joined by:

David Deming: David Deming, I am the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at Harvard.

Laine Perfas: He studies education, inequality, and the future of work, and co-leads the College-to-Jobs Initiative at the Kennedy School. Then:

Hill: Nancy Hill, and I’m the Charles Bigelow Professor of Education and a developmental psychologist in the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Laine Perfas: Nancy’s research focuses on parenting and adolescent development. And finally:

Susanna Siegel: Susanna Siegel. I’m the Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy in the Philosophy Department at Harvard.

Laine Perfas: She’s written a lot about perception, drawing on both philosophy and the sciences of the mind.

And I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, your host and a writer for the Harvard Gazette. Today, we’ll be taking a critical look at liberal arts education.

I think it’s important to start with, one, what is a liberal arts education and, two, how is it different than other types of higher education?

Siegel: Sometimes when people ask about what a liberal arts education is, and why it’s valuable, you can hear it as a kind of veiled or indirect way of asking what the values of the humanities are, because nobody asks, like, oh gosh, what’s the point of studying STEM fields? But I think there’s another way of hearing the question, which is not so much focused on the humanities, but a different question of like, why should some young person waking up to the world in late adolescence subject themselves to an education of four years or so that expects them to study a range of topics, to expose themselves to a range of different subjects and modes of thought, even while ultimately concentrating on one or two more than others? What’s the value of that plurality? My answer is I take very seriously the relationship between liberalism and liberal arts. I think that W.E.B. Du Bois said in his debate with Booker T. Washington, you know, education is a training for democratic citizenship and one thing we would lose if we lost liberal arts education is we’d become far more susceptible to politics of domination, to systems of governance that really rely on a very tight control over the horizon of ideas.

Hill: I would add to that, because I think when we think about a liberal arts education and when people get into the discourse of the value of a liberal arts education, people think about the price tag, and I think if we lost the liberal arts education, I agree with Susanna, we would lose some of the richness of what it means to live in a civil society, to think about culture, to think about innovation. If we think about colleges as training for vocation, and many people do want a return on investment of their college tuition, particularly as we’re seeing college tuitions raised at such an astronomical rate, people do want to know, what am I getting for it? And I think part of what we are losing as we think about the liberal arts education is really helping people understand its true value; that it might not be able to translate immediately to a job the way some undergraduate majors do, but we haven’t done a good job of saying, what value does it add to the kinds of careers that you might want? We’ve long since passed the stage where people start a job and stay in that job and work their way up and retire with the gold watch. We have to really think about preparing young people and preparing a workforce to really navigate a very creative and innovative career where they’re needed to reinvent themselves in relation to society, their interests, and their goals. And I think a liberal arts education provides that kind of intellectual flexibility and cognitive flexibility that society really needs.

Deming: Since I’m an economist, maybe I should craft an economic argument for what a liberal arts education does for people and how it differs from, let’s say more vocationally oriented training. So like why, if you want to be in finance, why not just major in finance and take a bunch of courses in finance? And the reason, which is something related to what Nancy said, is that people typically go to school at the very beginning of their lives and then whatever they learn has to last them for the next 40 to 50, God willing, years of life. And so the question is, what kind of education will prepare you not just for your first job, but for the rest of your life? The argument for a liberal arts education is the argument that precisely because it is general, when it’s well-executed, it is teaching you not a set of specific competencies in some specific thing, but rather giving you a set of tools to teach you how to think about the next problem over the horizon that we don’t have an answer to now because it hasn’t come around yet. And so that involves the ability to think critically. If someone’s telling me something, how likely is it to be true? What is their motivation? How much should I trust this source of information? How much should I think about somebody’s incentives to tell me the truth or not tell me the truth and how should I weigh evidence when perspectives are competing? Those are all things that are not really vocations. They’re really teaching you how to weigh evidence and how to think critically about other people’s perspectives and to adopt other people’s perspectives. And that’s a kind of teaching you how to think, teaching you how to learn tool kit that I think when done well, liberal arts education can do better than much more specific training for a specific job.

Hill: Yeah, I want to follow up on that because I think in some ways it’s really how we’re talking about what a liberal arts education is in the public discourse. And so I think it’s easier to sell and easier to help people understand the value of a liberal arts education when they’re attending a four-year institution in their early 20s, in the very typical graduate from high school, go to college, graduate in four or six years, as they say. But the vast majority of people who attend college don’t go to college that way. They might go to college part-time, and when you’re paying a single tuition and you can take as many courses as you want, then I think it’s easier to see the value of taking courses that are broad and around one’s area of interest. But if you have to pay for the courses one at a time, a credit at a time, and you’re doing this part-time and you’re seeing it very specifically to your career and upward mobility, I think we haven’t made the liberal arts education attractive and innovated to make it attractive to people who are doing college in ways that we sometimes forget that that’s the majority of the ways in which people get their four-year degree. It’s overtime, it’s at night, it’s part-time, It’s almost as if the liberal arts education they’re experiencing is a luxury good, and we’re seeing it as an essential aspect of education.

Laine Perfas: I hear all of you saying that the liberal arts focuses on critical thinking and analysis. Which is really valuable, but what I’m wondering is, is that enough in the current economy? Can it get people who are taking those classes in the jobs that then allow them to actually pay back the high cost they had to pay for the education in the first place?

Deming: There is no study, at least that I’m aware of, that shows that being a philosophy major makes you a better CEO or something like that. However, there is some evidence that the earnings gap between people who major in liberal arts and people who major in applied fields like computer science and engineering is much larger right after college than it is in adulthood. It’s because people who major in liberal arts tend to catch up. So it suggests that the penalty you think you’re paying for majoring in liberal arts is much less over your lifespan than it appears when you first graduate.

I think it’s important when we think about the landscape of higher education currently to hold two ideas that seem contradictory, but are actually not, in our minds at the same time. So one is that colleges can be doing much better than they currently are. We could be delivering much more value for money and we haven’t adapted to meet the needs of the workforce today. And then at the same time, another thing that’s true is that by and large, most people who go to college get a good return on their investment. That’s accounting for their tuition costs and the opportunity costs of their time; that despite all of its warts it still ends up being a good bet for most people. Now it’s risky and it takes some time to pay off and people get upset because they’re paying quite a lot and the benefits take a long time to be realized and they don’t always happen for everybody, but if you just look at, you know, putting your money in the stock market rather than paying for tuition or investing in other social interventions like public health campaigns or universal basic income or pick your policy, the return on investment in an economic sense for, hey, instead I’m going to park my money into four years of tuition, it tends to be a good investment just in a dollars-and-cents terms. So I don’t think you have to choose between a liberal arts education and a vocational trade. I think there’s lots of ways that we can deliver the breadth and the depth of a liberal arts and sciences education while also doing it in the context that gives people the skills to work in a team, to understand each other, to think critically. I just think there’s so much opportunity that we’re really not picking up.

Hill: David, can I ask you a question about that? It used to be that many companies would hire graduates with any major. In fact, they wanted majors that were adjacent to their field. And then they figured we can train them up on what we need them to do. But it seems now that businesses aren’t really valuing that kind of broad exposure in the ways that they used to. What are you seeing?

Deming: I think they still are hiring those people. Maybe they’re not doing it as much and maybe they’re a bit less happy about it. So it’s always important to look at people’s behavior, not what they say. So if you read The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, you’re going to hear a lot of think pieces about how college degrees aren’t that useful. But then if you look at the employment numbers, it turns out that like actually entry-level college graduates, they’re not doing as well as they were in the boom times of the ’90s, but there’s a lot more of them now than there used to be. So it’s not enough to just have a college degree. Now they want you to have an internship and they want you to have done something more relevant. So I think of it more as like a gradual ratcheting up of the standards for getting a quote-unquote good job, which I think makes the case more for the relevance of college.

Hill: But when I think about, as we think about how higher education has changed, now many more high school students are going to college. We’re up to 60 percent of high school students go directly into some form of college, but we’re still only at 37 percent of the workforce having a four-year college degree. So we’re getting this kind of drop-off of people who aren’t finishing. And so we have more than half of the workforce that are figuring out how to make a living wage without a college degree. And I want to make the case that this kind of broad investment in a liberal arts education is useful to everyone.

Deming: I agree with that. I know that we’re here talking about liberal arts education in particular, but we tend to argue a lot about how education should look, but I think the first sort of thing is people need to be more educated. Like, there needs to be more of all of it. And that’s not because I’m in the education field. This is not a self-interested commentary. I’m saying this because education is one of those things that as society becomes richer and more prosperous, and as technology changes our possibilities, we want more of it, not less of it, because the level of sophistication you need to be a productive employee is just increasing over time. And a big worry I have is all the negative vibes around higher education is obscuring this reality and that we’re just not doing enough to educate the next generation of young people for the demands of the economy.

Siegel: Can I introduce a slightly different perspective on some of these questions?

Laine Perfas: Yeah, go for it, Susanna.

Siegel: There’s a way of talking about these questions as we’ve been doing, which is a very natural way of thinking about it in terms of the individual consumer choice. But we could also think about it in terms of the social incentives to offer liberal arts education, and I think some of those incentives might not be visible from the point of view of the kid or of the parent. They really are at the level of principles for organizing society.

I like this idea of organizational intelligence. Anybody who’s ever been in any kind of organization of any size knows the complexities involved in trying to gather all the information that’s distributed across different people’s perspectives in a cooperative scheme. And you can run your organizations in a way that relies very much on brute force. But, you know, people don’t like to be bossed around. If you’re going to have any kind of organization that isn’t just a very top-down, brute-force sort of thing, at any level of life, you need a set of habits where you have practiced encountering other people’s perspectives. Because the habits of interaction you develop in the classroom or meeting people who are coming from who knows where, those skills, those habits, that openness, that will serve you extremely well in organizations. And you could call that a kind of individual skill of critical thinking, but I actually think it’s more than that. I actually think it’s far more relational. That’s the value of liberal arts education, and that’s why it should really matter to society.

Laine Perfas: So I do want to say one thing. When we were considering doing this episode, we did realize that we might run the risk of sounding very biased because of the people who are participating in this episode. All of us are in higher education. All of us are college-educated. So given that, I do want to put on the hat of a skeptic. One thing that I saw in preparing for this episode is that there’s a Gallup poll last year that showed only 36 percent of people right now have confidence in higher education, period. So my question is, since you are all people who have seen the benefits and can clearly see the value, is the problem that we’re just failing to communicate that value or are these institutions failing to deliver?

Siegel: If you sort of look at public opinion and measure people’s reactions to higher education and say, gosh, I’m losing faith in them, it has to be taken into account that this sampling of public opinion is taking place in an era where the university is being targeted for specifically political reasons. And it’s not just the United States, it’s all over the world. Of course, it’s always a good opportunity to ask the questions we’re asking about what are we doing, what principles should guide it, what is its value, and I think those are very important conversations to have, but I think we should be wary of looking at any sort of results we might have as public opinion as if they were somehow tracking what’s going on inside of the universities.

Hill: I want to say a couple of things in response to that. And I think one is if we know our history, which is part of the liberal arts, if we know our history, we’ll remember that public education began in part to ensure that the electorate was informed. And so this idea of connection between education and literacy and exposure to ideas and democratic participation is you know, embedded in who we are as a country here in the United States. I do agree it’s essential to a society, but if it’s so essential, maybe we shouldn’t charge so much for it. And this is back to the return on the investment, that if people are thinking about how do I make a living? — and in my research with adolescents as they’re making these decisions to go to college or not, they’re thinking about the economy. They’re thinking about the likelihood that they’re going to be able to get a job. They’re thinking about whether or not they see the economy as unstable. And so in our research, students who think that the economy is unstable, they disengage. They don’t dig in the way we think about from human capitalist theories that, you know, if the economy is bad, I’m going to go back to school. They disengage because they’re not sure that their efforts will pay off. And so then we say, how about a liberal arts education? And we haven’t made it connect to their sense of insecurity about their future. And some of my colleagues’ work show that when parents think that the economy is insecure, they become much more controlling. They become much more concerned about linking education to a future job. And so there isn’t a sense of freedom to explore a liberal arts education when people are concerned about the economy.

Deming: We’ve been talking also about the fact that more and more people are going to college and people see it as an economic necessity, and yet they’re losing confidence in it. So I take that as a political question, which is, why is it that people are so upset with higher ed or they don’t trust institutions of higher education to deliver on what they want? Which isn’t just an economic thing because clearly they’re still going, so in dollar-and-cents terms they still think it makes sense, but it’s really a question of politics and values. And so I think it’s fair, you know, for the public to say, I don’t necessarily trust an institution. We should listen to that if a bunch of people say, look, I know I have to send my kids to college but I don’t trust what’s going to happen with them when they get there. As a society and certainly not as an institution like Harvard, that wants to be seen positively by the public, I don’t think we can afford to just explain that away. I think we have to deal with it.

Laine Perfas: I want to return to something Nancy said at the beginning of the conversation and that’s that sometimes college in general, but specifically a liberal arts education, can feel like a luxury. I know for myself, I’m a first-generation college student and it was a hard road getting to college, graduating as a first-gen student without a clear roadmap, and I would love to hear all of your thoughts on how socioeconomic status, how race, class, all of these other parts of who we are, how they give us a different perspective on this issue.

Deming: It’s a loaded question. You know, Harvard educates the scions of wealthy families and titans of industry and also produces the world’s greatest scientists that develop knowledge and create vaccines that save millions of people. We contain multitudes in that way, and I think we have to recognize that in the way we talk about ourselves and in the criticisms that we receive from outside of the academy.

Siegel: We started off talking about liberal arts education in general in this sort of abstract level that I thought was very helpful. And now suddenly we’re talking about our own specific institution but, you know, if we’re asking about liberal arts in general, I don’t know if we find the kind of performative contradiction that David’s trying to point to when he says, OK, if you’re not part of the elite when you come here, you might well become it when you leave. Just because of the channels that are here, indeed, that’s why many people want to come here so that they can do that. But that’s just us, that’s nothing to do with liberal arts education in general, like Nancy was saying, and I completely agree. We can find the mode of liberal arts education in all kinds of places. Liberal arts education does not equal Ivy League education.

Deming: I do think there’s a sense in which this is the spirit of Sam’s question that the idea of studying liberal arts is a luxury for people who come from privilege, and who are able to go into jobs that are going to make them masters of the universe, so to speak, when they leave a place like Harvard. I do think if you look at the distribution of majors across colleges, liberal arts majors are more common at elite universities than non-elite universities because people who go to these non-elite universities typically go there because they want to get a good job.

Siegel: Yeah, fair enough. I guess there’s a kind of empirical and a principled way of thinking about these questions, and they’re both valuable ways of thinking about them. I was focused on the principled thing of, what would be lost with, from a liberal arts education, just abstracted from its social realization.

Hill: Yeah, I want to come back to Sam’s point about the socioeconomic status part of this. And for people who are first-gen and people from low-income backgrounds, I want them to come in to any college, whether it’s a state college or two-year college or Harvard, and feel confident in taking courses that broadly expose them to ideas, to history, to science, to literature, and broaden their thinking. But for some, that feels risky, that they’ve got one shot. They might be the first person in their family. They might be the first person in their community, and it feels like a lot of pressure, and in our focus groups with teens who are first-generation students it feels like a lot of pressure, that they have to deliver on this opportunity that’s like winning the lottery ticket to be able to go to college. And then they have to turn around and come home and make the case that they’re majoring in philosophy, and I want them to major in philosophy and history and literature and to become thinkers. But we have to give them the language that they can go back home and say, this is why I should be studying this instead of a business degree.

Siegel: Yeah, what we always say to students, because as you can imagine, it comes up a lot in the philosophy department, where I will note that our enrollments have only grown over the past 10 years — we don’t have a crisis of the humanities in the philosophy department. We’re getting more and more concentrators all the time. And it’s because we made this concerted effort to do a lot more outreach and to explain exactly these things that you’re asking about. And one of the things we say is we talk about the communication skills that you get from being able to analyze arguments and rehearse them and put your own reactions in parentheses while you consider opposite and opposing reactions and then be able to become articulate on the page in writing about the relationship between those perspectives. The general communication skills are extremely useful. So none of this is as highfalutin’ as I was talking about before, though I stand by every highfalutin’ thing I said but in terms, if you want to actually communicate to the person, you know, right here now on the ground and say, what can I tell my parents? This is what we suggest that they tell their parents. And it seems to work because our enrollments are growing.

Laine Perfas: Before we close. I wanted to spend a little bit of time thinking about: What is the path forward for liberal arts, either in communicating its current value or evolving to better meet the needs of students today?

Hill: So often we think about [how] the college degree leads to upward mobility. We’re often, whether we say it or not, thinking in economic terms and career trajectory terms. But what does it mean to live a fulfilling life? And when I think about just the rise in mental health disorders, loneliness, depression, anxiety, and all of these things that come from the difficulties we have in connecting with each other and building community with each other, engaging people whose views are different from our own, and being willing to change our mind. And all of those things have impacts on our physical health and our mental health and well-being. And the kind of broad liberal arts education is going to enable us to connect to people across cultures, societies, backgrounds. It’s going to give us skills to deconstruct our identities and reinvent ourselves in new ways. We talk about it in our research. We see how youth come to college. They leave their home communities and they take a germ of themselves with them from those home communities and they let a lot of it go and then they reinvent themselves. We used to think people find themselves in college. They don’t find themselves in college. They learn how to reinvent themselves and rediscover themselves. And I think that is quintessential to the liberal arts education.

Deming: One thing we haven’t talked about at all is technology and how the classroom is, I think, changing in response to technology. It’s not like people couldn’t cheat on their assignments before generative AI. But now it’s just much, much easier And I think what that really says to me is that we really need to rethink how we develop student skills in the classroom through assignments. And I think there’s a real opportunity to do that. I think the liberal arts could lead the charge. Let’s design classroom-based assessments that help them do that directly. Let’s not just give them an essay and then grade it. Let’s have them give a presentation. Let’s make them try to convince somebody of a different point of view. Let’s have them work together with people and then have their peers grade how much they learned from them and things like that. I think there’s a ton of opportunity specifically in the liberal arts to design a classroom environment that is more engaging, is more adapted to new technologies, and is intellectually rigorous. I think my experience is students really respond when you do hold them to high intellectual standards. And so I think there’s an opportunity for not just the liberal arts, but anybody who really wants students to engage critically with things, to redesign their classroom in a way that’s both technologically savvy and engaging for students in this age of AI.

Hill: I totally agree. I think gone are the days of: Write an essay. And I think here are the days where we work on projects and ideas together in teams, convincing each other, debates, deliverables that apply knowledge. I love the idea of technology because I see it as an accelerator. It enables us to move to the next level more quickly. It accelerates our ability to digest and acknowledge and to think critically and to get all the ideas on the table so that we can really do what humans do best.

Siegel: I guess I will put in a good word for the essay. You can have one of your assignments be to write an essay. That’s not at all at odds with a lot of cooperative work or working in groups. I think definitely a both-and situation, when it comes to writing things. I think that’s actually a very important skill I wouldn’t want to lose. But absolutely the model where you’re just kind of, let me impart my information to you, that’s what I would leave behind, you know, hist and lit. The institution, and the classroom, it needs those students. We need everybody, it enriches the institution to have people there. That’s a very powerful message that I think can be empowering for the students as well.

Deming: Thank you all for joining me today. My pleasure.

Siegel: It’s a great conversation. Thank you.

Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. For a transcript of this episode and to find links to all of our other episodes, visit harvard.edu/thinking. This episode was hosted and produced by me, Samantha Laine Perfas. It was edited by Ryan Mulcahy, Simona Covel, and Paul Makishima, with additional editing and production support from Sarah Lamodi. Original music and sound designed by Noel Flatt. Produced by Harvard University, copyright 2024.

Recommended reading and viewing

• “ In the Salary Race, Engineers Sprint but English Majors Endure ” by David Deming for The New York Times
• “ The End of the English Major ”from The New Yorker
• “ What’s the Point of Education ?” by Nancy Hill and Rakesh Khurana
• “ The Philosopher of the Real World ” from Harvard Magazine

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Associate Professor of History, Assistant Dean of Faculty for Pre-Major Advising, Dartmouth College

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Lately, in the heated call for greater STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education at every level, the traditional liberal arts have been needlessly, indeed recklessly, portrayed as the villain. And STEM fields have been (falsely) portrayed as the very opposite of the liberal arts.

The detractors of the liberal arts (who usually mean, by liberal arts, “humanities”) tend to argue that STEM-based education trains for careers while non-STEM training does not; they are often suspicious of the liberal political agenda of some disciplines. And they deem the content of a liberal arts education to be no longer relevant. The author of a recent article simply titled, “ The Liberal Arts are Dead; Long Live STEM conveyed this sentiment when he said, "Science is better for society than the arts.”

I see this misunderstanding even at my own institution, as a humanist who oversees pre-major advising and thus engages with students and faculty (and parents) from all over the university. The idea that STEM is something separate and different than the liberal arts is damaging to both the sciences and their sister disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Pro-STEM attitudes assume that the liberal arts are quaint, impractical, often elitist, and always self-indulgent, while STEM fields are practical, technical, and represent at once “the future” and “proper earning potential.”

STEM is part of liberal arts

First, let’s be clear: This is a false and misleading dichotomy. STEM disciplines are a part of the liberal arts. Math and science are liberal arts.

In the ancient and medieval world, when the liberal arts as we know them began to take shape, they comprised grammar, logic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy (the last three we would count as STEM disciplines today; and music, dealing mostly with numerical relationships through sound, was really more akin to what we would today call physics).

Advocates of STEM are missing the point. The value of a liberal arts education is not in the content that is taught, but rather in the mode of teaching and in the intellectual skills that are gained by learning how to think systematically and rigorously.

These intellectual skills include how to assess assumptions; develop strategies from problem solving; test ideas against evidence; use reason to grapple with information to come to new conclusions; and develop courses of action to pursue those conclusions.

Yes, some disciplines might prepare for certain types of problem solving (how do I get a computer to integrate information from two different consumer data platforms in the most elegant fashion?) more strongly than others (what do I recommend to investors based upon my French-language research of markets in Madagascar?).

And some areas of knowledge might be more useful than others in certain industries.

But in all cases, the point of the liberal arts approach is to learn how to think, not simply what to know – especially since information itself is now so easily acquired through Google and the smartphone. If anything, content is too abundant for any single individual to master. What is much more important is knowing what on Earth to do with the glut of information available in most situations.

And here is where the liberal arts training comes in.

A liberal arts education (STEM-based or otherwise) is not just about learning content, but about knowing how to sort through ambiguity; work with inexact or incomplete information, evaluate contexts and advance a conclusion or course of action.

In other words, it is not about learning the prescription to achieve a textbook result. It is about having the intellectual capacity to attack those issues for which there is yet no metaphorical text or answer.

Is liberal arts the choice of the elite?

Now, let us take up the elephant in the room. Many people would argue an engineering degree balanced with some English courses might be a nice idea.

But for a student to major in English or studio art is sheer craziness. What does one do with a studio art degree except become a starving artist? What does one do with an English degree except wait tables?

Those who make such arguments usually conflate “liberal arts” with “humanities,” those disciplines that do not have an obvious “end career goal” or a “remuneration outcome” at the other side of the college degree.

When detractors hear educators like me say that “the liberal arts” are valuable, they understand us to mean that they fulfill something in the core of our souls. That is, that the humanities are personally and intellectually valuable, but not remuneratively so.

They hear us acknowledge that the humanities are decidedly not practical, and are thus are the purview of the elite and privileged who can afford to indulge in them. But, of course, the idea that the only remunerative professions out there are in science and technology is silly.

Whole industries do in fact exist that are not based on STEM premises: media, consulting, fashion, finance, publishing, education, government and other forms of public service are just a few.

And even those reputedly “tech” industries that STEM advocates see as our future (IT, health, energy) require all sorts of nontechnical employees to get their companies to work.

Further, basic communication, speaking and writing skills are absolute must-haves of anyone who is going to climb the ladder in any high-tech industry .

What defines success

That said, the so-called “practical” major (and I reject the designation) might have a more obvious, path to the entry level job of a solid career. This is only because the major has an apparently known professional pathway.

But that does not guarantee success in that field.

In fact, those other disciplines that detractors of the liberal arts (read: humanities) assume are dead ends could well be fantastic springboards to amazing professional lives.

They are not a guarantee of one – and neither is a STEM degree . But they give those students who have committed seriously to the study of excelling within their college discipline (be it classics, anthropology, or theoretical physics) the capacity and the ability to achieve one.

Some people talk about this as critical thinking; some as the ability to think outside of the box; some as “transferability” – the ability to carry critical intellectual skills from one challenge or industry to another.

In my view, done right, liberal education makes one smarter and more able to be successful and innovative on the path one embarks on. And although we can all point to exceptions (would that Bill Gates had graduated from college!), for the most part, it is those who know how to think nimbly, creatively and responsibly that end up building extraordinary careers.

Why we need a liberal arts education

Let us return to my earlier point about STEM disciplines.

We should not only accept that they are part of a liberal arts education, but we must understand that teaching them within a liberal arts framework makes the financial investment of learning them of greater value.

Peter Robbie , an engineering professor at Dartmouth College who teaches human centered design, explains why liberal education is so critical to engineering training. He said in an email to me that:

creative design process of engineering provides the means for complex, multidisciplinary problem-solving. We need to educate leaders who can solve the ‘wicked problems’ facing society (like obesity, climate change, and inequality). These are multifactorial problems that can’t be solved within a single domain but will need liberally-educated, expansive thinkers who are comfortable in many fields.

As we know, an engineer who has basic cultural competency skills (honed, for instance, through cultural studies) will be an attractive asset for an American engineering firm trying to branch out in China.

Likewise, a doctor who knows how to listen to patients will be a better primary care doctor than one who only knows the memorizable facts from medical school. This is one reason that medical schools have recently changed the requirements of application to encourage coursework in sociology and psychology.

It is the ability to use these skills honed by different types of thinking in various contexts that allows people to build beyond their particular ken.

And that is what a liberal arts education – science, technology, humanities and social sciences – trains. It prepares students for rich, creative, meaningful and, yes, remunerative, careers.

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The Value of a Liberal Arts Education is More Than Most Know

Columns appearing on the service and this webpage represent the views of the authors, not of The University of Texas at Austin.

“What are you going to do with that?” Many new graduates will hear this question in the coming weeks.

For a business or computer science graduate, the answers seem obvious. What about someone studying a liberal arts field, like English or history or philosophy? A common misconception sees these as useless subjects or a waste of valuable resources. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Given the skills employers want, the traits we need in the next generation of leaders, and the qualities we value in our neighbors and friends, we might well ask the liberal arts grad, “What can’t you do with that?”

The main concern people have about liberal arts is marketability. Where are the jobs for people studying ancient Greek or African history? Everywhere. Because what those students are learning, alongside verb forms and dates, are the skills that appear time and again on top of employers’ wish lists. Skills such as persuasion, collaboration and creativity.

Does this mean that a liberal arts degree is as financially lucrative as computer science or petroleum engineering? No. But liberal arts majors do just fine in the workplace. Liberal arts students go on to earn good livings in a wide variety of fields, including technology.

In fact, the median annual income of a liberal arts major is just 8% lower than the median for all majors and more than one-third higher than the median income of people without a college degree.

Liberal arts offer not just financial value, but also personal, social and cultural values. The liberal arts take their name from the Latin word “liber,” which means “free.” Originally this referred to the education of free persons as distinct from slaves, but freedom is still at the root of the liberal arts. Liberal arts are a privilege of a free society, and the study of the liberal arts helps to keep us free.

Why is this? Contrary to what some would have us believe, our financial and social well-being depends on how we respond to the kinds of open-ended questions that liberal arts fields are asking. A computer scientist wants to invent a cool new app or technology. Whether he does a good job is measured by how much money his product earns.

As we see all too often, little thought is given to the social effects of these new technologies. They cause serious harm that people trained in writing computer code and making money may be unable or unwilling to address. Earnings can’t measure the things that most of us really care about when we think about new technologies.

This is where the liberal arts come in. The bedrock of a liberal arts education is the ability to understand a complex situation from many different viewpoints. To understand that the same information may look different to different people, or even to the same person at different times. We need the liberal arts to address questions that have no one right answer. And most of the important questions facing society are questions like this.

For instance, with all the technologies revolutionizing our society, how should we balance the need for accurate news and information with individual free speech? Where is the line between a legitimate business use of personal data and exploitation? Who gets to decide? So far, technology companies have done a lousy job of grappling with these questions. Some history majors, with their rich understanding of how complex forces shape society over time, would be a great idea.

Such skills have value in lots of places besides the workplace. The philosophy major on the church executive board is thinking about how the bedrock values of his community should inform decisions about replacing the roof or hiring a new Sunday school teacher. The English major participating in an environmental advocacy group can use her rhetorical and analytical skills to narrow the gap between the near-unanimous scientific consensus on climate change and political inaction on the issue.

The mistaken view that liberal arts are not financially valuable creates the more damaging idea that some fields of study have financial value, while others have social values. With liberal arts, we get both. Our society depends on it.

Deborah Beck is an associate professor of classics at The University of Texas at Austin.

A version of this op-ed appeared in The Hill .

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A Guide to the Discourse About Liberal Education

Some of our observations on the discursive categories we've identified..

Arguments about liberal arts accumulate slowly, almost imperceptibly, on the forest floor of higher education. The detritus of more than a century of episodes in the rhetorical life of liberal arts education, they are built up by cycles of the fierce argument, exuberant expansion, portents of doom, and beneficient forgetting that characterize modern higher education’s relation to the idea of the liberal arts. 

Three years into our work as directors of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College, we’re newly conscious of the provenance of these claims about liberal arts that circulate within the contemporary American public sphere, across the global span of higher education, and backwards in time. Some of these claims are newer; others have long histories. 

Everyone seems to have a take on the liberal arts. College admissions officers, authors of , earnestly-written books that about the future of academia, former college presidents, higher ed policy-makers, interested journalists, college professors, high-school guidance counselors, Twitter randos, conservative pundits, ed tech executives , business leaders. All of them try to offer a definition of “liberal arts” as they speak to their audiences. The googleable history of the idea is recited dutifully: we are reminded of the trivium and quadrivium; the fateful meeting between the American college and German research university is rehearsed. But far more history is forgotten, ignored, or side-stepped. In place of history, we list the virtues of liberal arts in a vague and comforting way. They vacillate between a melancholic yearning for a lost form of liberal arts education and a blustery confidence in liberal arts as a weapon with which to meet an uncertain and slightly menacing future. But few offer a tangible definition of the concept of liberal arts, and therefore few offer much confidence. 

Part of the problem with defining liberal arts is that the concept seems so open that almost everyone can claim to be profoundly identified with it. The term is so plastic that “liberal arts” frequently serves in public discourse as an all-purpose scornful stand-in for any number of tenuously related things:  for higher education, for educated elites, for the opposite of useful or instrumental education, even for any political disposition even slightly to the left of the far right. 

And yet we can see some some persistent lineages emerge from out of the sea of formless talk that invokes “liberal arts”. Each of those strains has ties to a specific history of practice and ideology within higher education or public culture. Some align closely and intentionally with a particular agenda; others seem like accidental creations. Some trace a consistent line across more than a century; others have seen their fortunes rise dramatically and fall precipitously over time. But each of the twelve propositions we’ve identified intrigue us; they offer the seeds of research projects of various scales and types that we hope to undertake and support.

By uncovering the conditions in which they came into being, expanding the institutional landscape,  repopulating the narratives with a wider array of individual figures, and turning towards the intractable problems they often both mark and gloss over, we hope to uncover both some more concrete definitions, particular practices, and a wider world of what liberal arts education has been, is now, and might be in the future. 

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A Deeper Look

Uncertainty. The view that liberal arts is the best possible response to uncertain futures of work and life is particularly common in 2018. But it has a long history, arguably reaching  all the way back into the medieval university or classical era and their assumptions about what a “free man” required from education in order to rule himself and the world around him. In the nineteenth century when Harvard President Charles Eliot introduced the elective course into higher education, he argued in part that individuals needed to make their own choices about what to learn in the process of their own unpredictable personal journey through life. Since then, the definition of liberal arts as unpredictability has been tied both to this romantic vision of individual flourishing and to the sense that white-collar or professional employment requires some measure of adaptability and flexibility to unforeseen circumstances. Unpredictability in this sense is both a justification of a liberal arts approach and an explanation of the variability of the courses and majors available within a liberal arts curriculum. Rarely, however, do liberal arts faculty and administrators think deeply about whether unpredictable conditions of study produce (or even resemble) the capacity to navigate uncertain future contingencies in work and life . 

Recombination. The idea that the liberal arts is about the freedom of individual learners to make their own choices about subjects and methods they wish to learn and then to combine what they know in original or distinctive ways is possibly the most comforting of all to students, parents, professors, college presidents and most of the public. The physicist who is also a virtuoso pianist, the philosopher who designs solar-powered cars, the Shakespeare expert who writes white papers on the epidemology of ebola, are guaranteed a place in their alumni magazines, in the hearts of the faculty that taught them, and in the MacArthur genius grants of tomorrow. As with unpredictability, Charles Eliot’s revisionary insistence on the elective as the heart of American higher education is an important part of this story. But it’s also difficult to really pinpoint the structures or approaches in contemporary liberal arts institutions that consciously engender these kinds of recombinant outcomes–and hard to shake the suspicion that other double majors, other students with uniquely conceived courses of study, never really reconcile or connect the divergent threads of their education; liberal arts institutions like the claim a share of the credit for the achievements of its graduates, yet rarely assume responsibility for their failures or disappointments. Nor is it easy to separate out the legacies of a four-year undergraduate education from later experiences that might more richly inform or shape a distinctive fusion of divergent forms of knowledge and skill in a given graduate.

Autodidactism. Almost as comforting is the proposition that liberal arts students “learn how to learn”, that they are acquiring meta-knowledge of disciplines, methods, and skills that sets them apart from people who have not had this kind of education. While many institutions design disciplinary and interdisciplinary structures to emphasize method and meta-knowledge, this claim appears as often in contexts where students encounter disciplines with fiercely specific and highly bounded methods; in this latter case, “learning how to learn” must arise from the proximity of different learning experiences or from the particular pedagogy of  Like many assertions about liberal education, it’s difficult to separate from the abilities and social capital that many students carry into higher education from the benefits they reap from it four years later. It also can be difficult to clearly trace how separate disciplines that may hold themselves to have specific and highly bounded methods and epistemologies nevertheless produce this metaknowledge in liberal learners. 

Critical Thinking. “Learning how to learn” is miles more specific and tangible than another very common claim, that liberal arts education is “critical thinking”. In a sense, “critical thinking” and “liberal arts” are a match made in heaven–that is, of two often-invoked ideas that can mean almost nothing and almost anything all at once, and that can in fact each mean something deeply important and brimming with potential. Thinking, slightly modified; the value-added imagined here is “critical,” which holds the bag for everything that education may be said to have done while also preserving an alibi. Critical thinking attempts to strip ideology and even any particular content away from the idea of liberal education; it invokes the autonomy of individuals, their ability to think independently of and about the conditions of their education. 

Humanities. Critical thinking is therefore very different for those uses of liberal arts to mean humanities disciplines pure and simple – as often seen in far-right trolling (snowflake liberal arts majors) as well as in a more subtle, background assumption within the culture of academia itself. The association of the two is not unfounded: as Laurence Veysey points out, the defenders of “liberal learning” who armed themselves against the rise of the practical or utility-driven research university expressly identified themselves as humanists opposed to new disciplinary forms of scientific inquiry. In the swirl of current anxieties about science majors, those older views are sometimes pulled up as sediments that color ongoing conversations and deliberations with an irritable turbidity. At the same time, almost no one in the contemporary environment seriously advocates framing a liberal arts curriculum as an exclusively humanistic one. 

Core Curriculum, Western Tradition. Though perhaps there is some element of that framing in various academic projects that define themselves as upholding “traditional” visions of the liberal arts: Columbia University’s Core Curriculum and St. John’s College’s “Great Books” approach, for example, as well as a number of religious colleges. With varying degrees of comfort, most of these institutional frameworks not only see themselves as defining liberal arts in terms of adherence to past approaches but even more specifically as connected to the “Western tradition”. Even for institutions that have no interest in defining liberal education in these terms, there is a seemingly unavoidable degree to which the concept references a specific history of teaching and institution-building in Western Europe. The rise of movements to decolonize or more thoroughly universalize university curricula are at least partially a result of this lingering connection. It’s hard to ignore the degree to which the defense of liberal arts is often undertaken by white male authors (both inside and outside of academia), but many of the virtues claimed for liberal learning as an approach have potential analogues in other historical traditions of formal education in East and South Asia and perhaps elsewhere. To us, at least, it feels as if the persistent, sometimes unspoken, connection between ideas about liberal learning and “the Western tradition” creates some unfortunate constraints on its future–but this is also a conversation so thoroughly implicated in long-standing culture wars that it is hard to engage it in a useful or interesting way. 

Anti-Vocational. Far more interesting to us is the intricate, contradictory domain of claims about the relationship between liberal learning and the work that its graduates undertake subsequently in life. To a great extent, we think this is the single most interesting thread that we would like to unravel and trace. The proposition that a liberally educated person must not be intentionally prepared for a single specific career reverberates all up and down the timeline of liberal arts as an idea, though in radically different contexts in classical and medieval institutions, and even in the 19th Century American academy. No other idea produces so many invocations–and misrepresentations–of the classical and medieval conceptualization of the educated person. The history of higher education in the United States is a series of confrontations between practicality and philosophy, utility and character-building, specificity of professional training and generality of liberal learning. The contemporary American debate about higher education, whether staged on Twitter, in family living rooms, in diners, in legislatures, or in faculty meetings, is drawn compulsively to the question of whether and how higher education should prepare students for future careers, and whether or not it already does so in some fashion. These conversations criss-cross a riotous range of informed descriptions of the actual curricula and pedagogy of higher education, mythological visions of college in the past and present, unexamined assumptions about the process of learning, and anxious marginally-informed pronouncements about the present and future of work and social transformation. We’ve decided that this theme is our greatest area of current engagement for the Aydelotte: there is so much to interpret and study within this domain, and the answers are so urgent for the present moment. Status Quo. At least some working understandings of liberal arts, on the other hand, amount to a quiet and simple blank-check benediction for the status quo, either at particular colleges or universities or across academia. Meaning, when asked “what do you mean by ‘liberal arts’”, at least some institutions effectively answer by saying, “Whatever we’re doing this second? That’s liberal arts”. This is less shallow than it might seem: what this approach really means to say is that existing structures of faculty governance and administrative management are trustworthy custodians of the meanings and implementation of liberal arts, and that liberal education arises as an emergent form out of the interaction of their various decisions. Considering that contemporary anxieties about higher education are far less novel or unprecedented than they are frequently described as being, it makes a certain kind of sense to serenely assert a kind of custodial duty to liberal learning and to carry on with that duty without being overly distracted by any given moment of supposed controversy or threat. Small Colleges. In a similar vein, there are more than a few definitions of liberal arts that simply assert that the term is defined not by concepts or histories but that it is a proxy for a specific kind of institution, namely small American colleges that are focused substantially or entirely on undergraduate education. The common acronym SLAC expresses this neatly: “small liberal-arts college”. This seems to us to be both true enough (that the term tends to invoke small colleges) and completely uninteresting. If liberal arts is simply a synonym for selective small colleges that collectively educate only a teeny fraction of the students graduating with bachelor’s degrees in the United States, it certainly cannot carry the weight of all the other expectations and anxieties that surround it. 

Citizenship. Finally, we’re interested in but also puzzled by a powerful, long-standing idea about liberal education that often haunts almost every other invocation of the concept. Namely, that liberal learning is peculiarly suited to the formation of character, the shaping of morality, or the creation of civic virtue. This is a proposition of long-standing, beloved by college presidents in 1875, 1925, and 2018, even if some of the descriptive vocabulary of virtues attributed to liberal learning shifts over time. “Ethical intelligence”, “global citizenship”, “social justice”, are in some sense the descendants of other virtuous attributes that colleges and universities claimed to hone or awaken in young people a century earlier. These claims puzzle us because in some sense they propose an empirical standard that perhaps unsurprisingly educational institutions have been in no hurry to test or examine further. Are graduates of liberal arts institutions better citizens by some measure? (And what would be “better”?) Are they ethically intelligent? (Are scholars who study ethics, for example, in any sense more likely to be ethical?) Any of these questions, if they could be answered in the affirmative through any kind of evidence of any kind, would pose a second set of questions: what is it about liberal education that is producing such an outcome? How do we know this isn’t better described as “class formation”? (Which, if it were, would not be self-evidently bad to everyone who expresses it–it’s just that that would be different than what educational institutions commonly imagine as their intentional practices.) We recognize that there are many interesting sentiments and histories bubbling under the surface of these kinds of claims, but for the moment, we are inclined to push them aside until we can think of a way to tackle them usefully. 

Character. This theme could also just as easily be titled “social or class reproduction”. Higher education outside the United States has been more explicit regarding this as a function of the university. The major public university systems of many European countries and their former colonies have long used qualifying examinations and other mechanisms to sort young adults into overtly class-linked hierarchies closely connected to particular kinds of employment. A small fragment of institutions that have conventionally described themselves as training for elite government and corporate leaders and a handful of esteemed professions, such as Oxford, Cambridge or the Sorbonne, have claimed to be involved in building “character”, a sort of mannerly public morality that once upon a time stretched from how to behave on the polo field or while eating ortolans to how to act in public when your spouse has an affair or when feeling in middle age that life has ceased to have joy and meaning. Some tie to older ideas of liberal education–the training of a ‘free’ citizen–has been visible within this commitment to cultivating character.

“Character” in the American academy has a more complicated and tortured history. As Veysey observes, the ascendant research university in the latter half of the 19th Century set itself against the “liberal education” of many private and religious institutions by promising that the research university was open to all citizens, and could offer to all students a kind of socioeconomic mobility untainted by “character”. A student could learn the arts and skills needed by a fast-paced industrial society, skills whose value could be stripped of the need for embedded or inherited cultural capital. With those skills, a graduate’s horizon was said to be unlimited. Veysey notes that for a good while, the response of the defenders of liberal education to this critique was not to deny the accusation but to embrace it, to agree that liberal education did in fact refine and extend the social virtues of the scions of elite or haut-bourgeois families. Nevertheless, in the early 20th Century, many small college and private universities adopted some of the features of the research university and with them began to scuff over or obscure the degree to which character and social standing were synonymous or connected, either by extending the benefits of character to anyone who might matriculate or preaching the importance of character to the proper use of professional or technical skills.

The link between liberal learning and the shaping of character–or many related ways to describe some combination of manners, ethics, behavior and affect–has remained strong up to the present in American higher education even as that connection also produces discomfort, embarrassment and anger. A prominent strain of criticism of the contemporary academy by writers like Mark Edmundson and William Deresiewicz complains of the extent to which higher education has abandoned the forging of character. Many make the opposite charge: that liberal learning is still tied too closely to the reproduction of the specific cultural identity of an older white, male establishment elite and hostile to everyone else. Faculty and administrators often look desperately for ways to renarrate or redescribe ‘character’ either as a technical-philosophical skill (“emotional intelligence”, “self-presentation”, “ethical intelligence”, “cultivating humanity”) or to re-situate it within larger and more open social formations (“global citizenship”, “cosmopolitanism”, “pluralism”).

At the same moment, the undeniably intensified role of higher education in producing social class in the United States has become a profoundly unsettling subject within academia and an explicit premise of public conversation about academia, not to mention an important underpinning of recent American politics. Here the theme of anti-vocationalism gets a particularly intense inflection from its relationship to both character-producing and class-producing visions of liberal education. So this is an area of both strength and weakness within the body politic of academia that we intend to persistently explore and prod at even as we are also aware of the jangled nerves and knotted musculature that flinch as a result of such prodding.  

This taxonomy of “liberal arts” and its meanings is both a product of research and a guide to research. We can see meanings of the term that are banally or historically shallow, and others that have a tendency to be anodyne or superficial. We see others that are zones of heavy, if often unreflective, contention both within academia and between academia and its myriad publics. It is enough to keep us occupied for a long time; we hope with some useful results. 

Timothy Burke's main field of specialty is modern African history, specifically southern Africa, but he has also worked on U.S. popular culture and on computer games.

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