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The Practical Value of the Liberal Arts

By Todd Larson

"This is a real change -- liberal arts graduates employable!" So joked Peter Jennings on a recent "A Closer Look" segment of ABC's World News Tonight addressing the blossoming job prospects for current college graduates. The "surprising" news behind the punch line: that 1998 liberal arts graduates would enjoy a six-and-a-half percent increase in their starting salaries -- up to $28, 875 -- thanks to their increased marketability in consulting, finance and other fields presumably more conducive to students majoring in business, accounting and other applied disciplines.

Jennings' knowing chuckle about the job prospects of liberal arts grads was likely just a nod to the popular sentiment that prizes common sense over "book learning" and practicality over privilege. After all, who hasn't heard the jokes about over-educated English or history majors working in low-paying "McJobs"? (Okay, just one quick one: The engineer looks at an idea and asks "How will it work?" The accountant looks at it and asks "How much will it cost?" The businessman looks at it and asks "How do we sell it?" The liberal arts grad looks at it and asks, "Do you want fries with that?")

Related Articles: Profiles - The business-world success stories of four Haverford Alums: Jackie Brady '89, David Morrison '90, Dina Pruzansky '92 and Brad Sutton '94. Haverford Inc.? - "There's no reason every Haverford student couldn't have their pick of jobs," says Brad Sutton '94. With this enviable possibility in mind, Sutton and our other alumni profilees offer candid and constructive observations of Haverford, its students, and what the College can do to better prepare them for life in the business world. Execs 101 - Read about Haverford's new Howard Teaf Business Society.

Jennings' cheeky optimism aside, the ABC report nonetheless preserved the notion that the liberal arts have become -- if they weren't already -- somewhat irrelevant in today's increasingly corporate and technological world. The expected salary gains for liberal arts majors, we learned, are actually just a result of the "the best [job] outlook in years," including record lows in unemployment, high demand for workers and, notably, the fact that they are beefing up their studies with computer-related courses that make them more marketable. The real moral of the story came courtesy of Marilyn Mackes, executive director of the National Association for Colleges and Employers. When asked by Jennings what she would do if starting college today and wanting "to make money at the other end," Mackes offered a simple one-word answer: technology. Computer science or computer engineering to be specific, programs whose graduates reap starting salaries in the $30,000-$50,000 range.

Such is the popular perception of the liberal arts in today's world: impractical, cloistered, marketable only in the best of times, and then only with the help of a computer class or two on the side. Of course all this talk of salaries and marketability may strike the liberal arts devotee as mere mass-media hype, typical in its short-sighted and utilitarian focus. Juicy starting salaries make for good TV sound-bites and satisfied "customers" (to invoke the latest higher-ed parlance), but might not those skills that fetch fifty grand today be obsolete five years from now, or doom their possessor to a dead-end career path? Don't liberal arts grads, with their breadth of education, communication skills, and capacity for lifelong learning, come out ahead of the narrowly-trained technicians in the long run? And who's to say that money indicates the value of one's career path anyway?

Liberal arts proponents have been making just these kind of claims for years in the myriad speeches, articles and even full-length books defending the continued relevance of their institutions in the face of declining enrollments (at last count, fewer than five percent of students attend liberal arts colleges). Befitting the subject, the rhetoric is impassioned, the sentiments lofty. The liberal arts, as their name suggests, make men "free" of ignorance and spread the knowledge essential to productive citizenship. They foster an awareness of and sensitivity to diverse cultures and perspectives, and provide an ethical and moral context for political and scientific decision making. They enflame one's passion for life, art and beauty, and provide the vision and inspiration that lead to leaps in human progress. The liberal arts graduate, we are told in a more practical moment, enjoys the unique ability to manage and discriminate the flood of information that increasingly characterizes our age, and thus transcends traditional vocational borders.

But try selling this to a parent who is wondering why her family and her child should pay $30,000 a year for a private liberal arts education when the state university costs half that much. Or to a parent who enjoys ABC World News, not esoteric educational journals. Or to the high school senior who is interested in a career in "business" and very logically assumes that a business degree is the ticket. This is the challenge faced by Delsie Phillips, Haverford's director of admission, every time she meets with prospective students or represents Haverford at the various college fairs around the country. "The question I hear all the time is 'Do you have business?'" she explains. "The answer on the surface is 'No.' You can grab them by the shirt and explain what you do have," Phillips continues, "but mostly they walk away. You can't leap out and assault them."

That the placid Phillips feels compelled to recruiting thuggery indicates a crucial aspect of the liberal arts' struggle for information-age relevance. Put simply, the point is not to win high-minded arguments about what type of undergraduate education best prepares the student for a successful professional career. Academic articles and book-length studies, while crucial for government and corporate funding decisions, are so much preaching to the choir when it comes to the broader battle for public acceptance. "People in business and people who teach business," Phillips notes, "understand the value of a liberal arts education."

Nor is the issue necessarily what liberal arts colleges have to do to be competitive in the education marketplace, as an increasing number of articles promoting a "customer orientation" within academia would suggest. The crucial challenge, at least from Phillips' perspective, is not to change, but to communicate -- to demonstrate to those skeptical customers the highly practical value of what the liberal arts offer right now. "A lot of people out there who aren't in business, or who don't have access to that information," she says, "see the quickest route to a business career as taking a business curriculum, and they may not realize that there are alternatives."

George Parker '60, director of the M.B.A. program and Associate Dean at the Stanford Business School, is a firm believer in those alternatives. "It seems counterintuitive," he explains, "but the one

"The logic of business is numbers, but the essence of business is intuition and creativity..." George Parker '60 Director of M.B.A. Program & Associate Dean, Stanford Business School

background we do not prefer in admissions at Stanford is an undergraduate business major." Business majors, he explains, are often constrained by the "careerist requirements" of their applied curriculums, learning at a basic level what will only need to be re-learned in business school. Parker notes that the disciplines Stanford does prefer -- the humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, and engineering -- instead hone students' intellectual skills "to their maximum" and foster more fundamental abilities like thinking, reasoning, communicating and creativity. "The logic of business is numbers," he notes, "but the essence of business is intuition and creativity" -- a fact that makes liberal arts majors "precious commodities" in the business world.

A recent national survey paradoxically underscores both Parker's optimism and Phillips' concerns, revealing a massive "practicality gap" between the perceptions of high school students and their parents and those of the business executives who will be their future employers. Parents, it seems, divide educational offerings into the "practical" (those that will help their children get a better job after college) and the "general" (learning for the sake of learning). And while they tend to agree with the business executives about those educational goals that are in fact the most practical -- problem-solving, critical thinking, writing and oral skills -- they do not view these goals as the special province of the liberal arts.

Nor do parents or high schoolers believe that the liberal arts offer "exposure to the business world" or "teach business-related skills" at all, unfortunate news in a climate where 85 percent of students and 75 percent of parents list "preparation for a better job" and "earning potential" as the primary reasons for attending college. Those aspects of a liberal arts curriculum that parents do view as unique -- the development of "an appreciation of culture" and "basic skills in the sciences, arts, humanities, and social sciences"-- are seen as rather general and thus not highly valued. "Parents," writes Richard Hersh, who details the survey in the educational journal Change, "reject what they perceive to be 'charming' Ivory-Tower liberal arts colleges that profess to turn out 'well-rounded' graduates."

Business executives, on the other hand, recognize that the apparently "general" skills imparted by a liberal arts college are also the most practical training for long-term career success. "Employers presumably are every bit as 'practical' as parents," Hersh explains. "But to them, practicality means the ability of higher education to produce people of strong character with generalized intellectual and social skills and a capacity for lifelong learning." His conclusions are similar to Phillips': liberal arts colleges, he claims, "need to communicate better to their key audiences what the 'liberal arts' they offer mean in today's and tomorrow's world and provide evidence that they do offer important skills for the world of work...It is now the task of the liberal arts college to demonstrate for stakeholders the assertions of its leaders."

With this advice in mind, HAVERFORD presents the stories and comments of several recent graduates who provide real-life evidence that the liberal arts continue to provide the best and, as it turns out, the most practical training around. We'll also hear some very candid commentary on how Haverford in particular prepares its students for careers in the business world, and consider some recommendations that this group of graduates claims are crucial to ensuring the future business success of Haverford students.