Check out this article from Inside Higher Ed highlighting comments made by President Obama about the discipline of Art History. It ends with a chart of politicians that have attacked liberal arts disciplines, only 4. I’m pretty sure it could be much longer than it is.
This article by Virginia Postrel in Bloomberg argues that Art History was a particularly bad major for President Obama to use in his comparison, noting that it’s a major for the elite and that people who have degrees in Art History are wildly over-represented in the top 1% of wage earners. Be that as it may, and whether he intended it or not, the President’s remarks were an implicit attack on liberal arts education in general. I take exception to that.
I do agree with the first part of his statement. It is possible to get a good, high-paying job without a college education. They are decent jobs and if that is what you know you want to do, you should do it. I see many people go to college who don’t need to, and arguably shouldn’t go, often accumulating debt working toward degrees they’re unable to complete, only to end up in a job they wouldn’t have needed it for.
That said, the decision not to pursue a college education is a big one, and not to be taken lightly, and it is not one I advise many people. Firstly because in the United States undergraduate education often has to make up for the deficiencies of K-12 education. In the public school system we have a huge amount of variety, not just from state to state, but from city to city, even within cities, public, private and now that division is complicated by charter schools. K-12 education gets a bad rap in the US. It’s not as desperate as some would have us believe, but it can be accountable to politically driven standards, curricula, testing, budgets, etc. Higher education largely escapes those, for the most part, anyway.
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istorical texts can be open to interpretation, literature beyond the canonical curriculum, study of another language, recent history, etc.… So any student who’s intellectually capable for pursuing a college education ought to have the opportunity. Many of us go to college thinking we know what we want to do, only to discover our talents are elsewhere.
Beyond that, Conditions of the contemporary labor market are such that I would argue a liberal arts degree with a strong core curriculum can be excellent preparation. Statistics show that for several decades the reality of work life has been that most people change jobs frequently, and careers at least once. When I refer to changing jobs, I mean taking a new job in essentially the same field. Changing careers is something more radical. Long gone are the days in which one could expect to stay with one company and work ones way up, but there is also increasing evidence that the days in which one can expect to even stay in the same field throughout ones career may be going as well. In other words, the banker who loses his job at MorganStanley and finds a job at Barclays Capital has changed jobs. But increasingly we’re finding people are obliged, at least once, to look in a different sector altogether. Our banker can’t find another banking job, so he starts a new career as a teacher, computer programmer or cop. This is due to the changing face of technology and the world around us. Many of the most sought after jobs today didn’t exist 15 years ago, and some of the jobs that were most in demand aren’t needed any more.
This is why I believe there is a risk in overspecialization at the undergraduate level, since it is at at that time that many professionals acquire the fundamental skills that help them adapt through career changes. Students who spend their entire academic career preparing for a specific job must find a job in that field and keep it. If they don’t, they’ll be challenged to learn anything else. On the other hand, the student who has developed facilities in all the basic skills—obviously reading, writing and arithmetic, but also critical thinking, communications, “information literacy,” and a certain foundation of general knowledge—will be able to acquire new skills quickly and easily. Certain disciplines focus far to much on skills in their discipline, in spite of the fact that students will still need graduate degrees or training after graduation to get a job.
The tone of the debate among many conservatives suggests that the only function of higher education is job training. If that’s the case then we may not even need to universities as we traditionally think of them. We can return to a system of apprenticeships and on the job training.