Don’t Get a Degree in Stupid

The liberal arts aren’t broken, the economy is broken

We’ve lost something in our economy and that’s the value of liberal arts degrees. In a world before the recession, a liberal arts degree in a variety of fields would give you access to a wide range of jobs. However, in the years since 2008, more and more companies are looking towards specificity and specialization leaving many people with liberal arts degrees on the side of the road. However, many companies, 10 years on, are only beginning to realize the value of the soft skills and other values that liberal arts graduates bring to the table.

Liberal Arts Grads Don’t Measure Up

In this scathing Linkedin post, the man illustrates many of the attitudes by some employers about hiring liberal arts graduates. Back in 2014, during the height of the liberal arts major crisis, Business Insider also posted an article titled simply, “Liberal Arts Majors Are Screwed.” Their advice was simple: change your major. They advise if you aren’t going to change your major, you should at least take technical or business classes to up your skills. There is a perception in the market and partly backed up by current jobs that liberal arts majors don’t have the technical skills that modern jobs require. Technology has completely infected the business world and businesses are looking for employees who can handle themselves well in this technical environment. There is an argument that liberal arts need to be more rigorous. However, I think many of these commentators think that the liberal arts aren’t rigorous. Getting a liberal arts degree is far from an easy thing. There are a variety of projects, writing assignments, research required, and often pages of reading requiring a decent ability to process information. That skill is certainly valuable in our modern environment of big data. This is what the liberal arts gives students and future employers, however, the fact that business has trended away from this belies an important change in the economy: many companies don’t want quality people, they want skilled workers. Those two desires can intersect but they are often different and attract a different kind of worker.

Liberal Arts Need to Find Ways to Translate Their Skills to the Workforce

Many liberal arts grads end up in decidedly non-technical fields like marketing and human resources. Liberal arts degrees are highly mobile but can often end up in less than stellar jobs. Their earnings also tend to lag behind their technical based peers. The broad advice now is that graduates from these degrees need to find ways to translate their skills into an actual job and continue to improve upon their skills. Much of this advice tends to fall flat because while arguing that liberal arts majors have to make sure they have skills, many of these articles basically end up telling liberal arts majors to either change their major or add many more classroom hours of technical training. Many graduates may not have talent in technical fields or technical ability. If they were able to access those skills in high school, it is unlikely that college is the best place for them to begin trying to gain those skills.

However, liberal arts grads have a variety of skills that business might not know they need at first — things like Communication, empathy, a broad understanding of the world around them and critical thinking. It is dangerous to only think about education as a pathway to a good job. Education can and should be more than that. When employers hire a liberal arts graduate, they are hiring a more complete human that can be trained and molded to the needs of the business. However, business culture has trended away from hiring people and merely hiring cogs in the wheel. Again, we have this juxtaposition between hiring quality people with the background to dig into a variety of different jobs and skilled workers who are specialized at one thing.

When We Lose Liberal Arts We Lose Who We Are

We now expect Universities to be vocational training grounds for the workers of tomorrow and they don’t do that very well. However, as college is now a business, rather than a public good, universities are stepping up vocational training at the cost of shutting down the Liberal Arts. The Liberal Arts are how we remember who we are a species. Maintaining these areas of study is how we teach young people who we are as humans and how we have progressed across time and culture. Even in technical fields, this education is invaluable for society. It’s the type of thing that creates quality people, not just advanced workers with some skills. Liberal arts graduates are the future professionals of tomorrow, not merely highly skilled workers.

Business Needs to Step Up

The advantage of a liberal arts major is that they can be trained to use their prodigious skills for a variety of business applications. Many new entrants will not have time to be trained in specific programs or business processes. This is where business needs to understand the value of having an employee as a blank slate and be willing to train them into the jobs that require soft skills and then give them the technical expertise required to perform those jobs. This is how the economy used to work and how it needs to again.

The Liberal Arts are far from “degrees” in stupid. Liberal arts graduates offer a variety of real skills and potential expertise for employers. However, it up to employers and the economy writ large to figure out how to take advantage of those skills and make them work for their business. This will require innovation, training programs, and much more but it is perfectly achievable. There is a large workforce that is currently under-employed ready, willing, and able to take on new roles that require these skills. Add some technical training and these graduates can be excellent employees for years to come.