The Liberal Arts Can Work
Support science and the arts—especially the arts,” advised the documentarian Ken Burns during his commencement address to Wash U Class of 2015. “They have nothing to do with the actual defense of our country. They Just Make Our Country Worth Defending!”
As a historian, Burns was probably referring to the liberal arts, not simply the traditional fine arts of painting, dance, music, and so on. They, too, have little to do with the defense of our country, though there is no consensus on what academic disciplines actually compose the “liberal arts.” Some who concern themselves with such classifications, generally with skin in the game, interchange the term with just the humanities disciplines: history, English, philosophy, and so forth. Others incorporate social sciences like psychology, political science, and economics, though professionals with backgrounds in these subjects often prefer to market themselves away from the lofty confines of academia. Still others count mathematics and the natural sciences among the liberal arts.
I don’t have the definitive meaning sorted out, but for simplicity’s sake, I like to think of the concept in contrast to a vocational, pre-professional education—“liberal arts” are, collectively, the academic fields of which a general literacy in most renders one a holistically educated, upstanding member of society. A liberal arts education is interdisciplinary and demands a diversity of coursework by its very nature. But while STEM and business tracks are growing in popularity at Wash U and across the country, the liberal arts are struggling to keep up.
As the cost of education goes up and the relative value of a bachelor’s degree declines, more and more Americans are viewing their college education as a “money in, money out” investment. By many estimates, US college costs have risen at a rate more than twice as high as inflation, rendering the experience more expensive and perhaps less valuable than in the past. The annual cost of a private college education, on average around $30,000, is more than half of the median American household income. In-state tuition at public schools isn’t much better, at around $10,000 per year. To make matters worse, student loans generally have high interest rates and are not easily refinanced, meaning these costs are often quite burdensome.
Furthermore, as more college grads go on to pursue postgraduate education, the power of a “mere” bachelor’s degree in the job market is weaker than ever before. There are countless stories of adults with complete college educations unable to find employment that pays the bills. It’s no surprise, then, that high school graduates are growing less concerned with earning a well-rounded (read: liberal arts) higher education. There’s a growing trend among this demographic (and its parents, who often ultimately call the shots) of pragmatically seeking the most efficient preparation for a specific career trajectory. And it less and less commonly involves the liberal arts.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, because the integrity of our workforce is the perennial dominant issue of contention for voters, politicians from both sides of the aisle have attacked or mocked the liberal arts. Even Barack Obama has stooped for the low-hanging fruit. “Folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree,” the President remarked before apologizing in jest. It should be noted that Obama himself attended a liberal arts college for two years before transferring to an Ivy League university, where he in turn received a liberal arts degree. A couple of months ago, Senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio said on the GOP debate stage that “we need more welders and less philosophers.” His pithy (and grammatically incorrect!) comment was clearly not off-the-cuff, and was received warmly by his audience.
Likely a less receptive audience would be a graduating class of semi-employed collegians, which brings us back to a man who addressed such an audience— Wash U commencement speaker Ken Burns. His own alma mater, Hampshire College, is so buried in the liberal arts that not only do its students not declare a major, they also don’t receive grades on their work. Their studies, like those of liberal arts students nationwide, largely exist in the vacuum of the material they are studying, the skills they gain sometimes more nebulous and less overtly transferrable than at more careerdriven institutions. It is clear that the liberal arts do not directly contribute to the defense of our country. However, the liberal arts certainly are capable of informing or misleading the public and mobilizing popular support for something like a war. Propaganda is certainly art—the Kemper Art Museum ran an exhibit about its use in World War I last year. But, perhaps more compelling than that bit is the end of Mr. Burns’ proclamation: how do the liberal arts make our country worth defending? What trait of pure intellectualism, free of any agenda but a deeper understanding of everything, is so inherently consequential?
I think that’s up to the individual to decide, and it’s often competing against paying the bills.
Previously, I had asked Jen Smith, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, what her thoughts were on the matter. “We want you to be doing things that you care about and living lives that are fulfilling,” she told me. “I worry that if college becomes a means to an end, we’re going to lose that.”
If a society whose members are cerebrally fulfilled isn’t one worth defending, I don’t know what society would be. But Dean Smith, whose school has hemorrhaged students to the engineering and business divisions, has been forced to reconcile those ideals with a degree (pun intended) of pragmatism. “It’s such a hard line to walk,” she said with the same sincerity as before, “without minimizing the very real amounts of money.”
And is that money real! After room and board, the cost of attending Wash U for the class of 2019, the current freshmen, is $63,373 per year. By comparison, a vocational education to become, let’s say, a welder, is a poetic tenth of that—$6,350 at the comprehensive welding program at the Lincoln Electric School in Cleveland. It’s hard to argue against those numbers, especially when the entry salary for Wash U Arts & Sciences grads will probably be significantly lower than the cost of one year of their education. From a purely economic standpoint, the welding job might be a better option—and besides, we actually do need more of them.
Of course, this is a false dichotomy. There are undergraduate education plans that don’t involve vocation or much of the liberal arts; these days, more and more students are choosing majors and schools that are in technology, business, or other pre-professional fields. According to the 2012 CIRP American Freshman report from UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, which surveyed incoming college freshmen across the country, more students now attend college in hopes of eventually making more money, rather than “to gain a general education and appreciation of ideas.” But both are possible—schools like Wash U that facilitate cross-enrollment in courses from the varying academic divisions help to promote a mix of liberal arts and more technically-oriented educations. Almost every course at Wash U, regardless of the undergraduate school running it, is open to students in the other schools; this, Vice Chancellor for Admissions John Berg told me, differentiates our university. “Some schools lock you into a college,” he said, emphasizing the ease of transferring schools and taking individual classes in many schools within Wash U. “We know students are going to change their minds.”
After talking to many adults in and out of academia, the general consensus I’ve heard has been that jobs requiring an undergraduate education teach most of the technicalities of what you need to know on the job. They don’t rely on a college education to have provided the specialized skills for the job, but rather the foundational knowledge, adaptability, and readiness to learn them. For jobs requiring graduate-level educations, most of that specialization happens in grad school, not in the first four years. So who says the liberal arts aren’t a strong preparation for a money-making job? In the liberal arts, adults tell me, the majors we choose probably won’t matter all that much in the scheme of things. Wash U culture idolizes picking up a second major or third minor, when the people who will be hiring its students probably won’t care beyond a certain threshold of curricular relevance. The finer distinctions don’t really matter. All roads in a diversified liberal arts education, at least in theory, lead to the acquisition of intangible skills like critical thinking and breadth of knowledge.
Is this an intelligent strategy? That is, spending four years not overtly advancing along a discrete career path. I don’t know. I say all of this, of course, as a sophomore; all of the above is a regurgitation of advice I have received, and my plan is to optimistically and unswervingly roll with it. By the time I graduate, I will (allegedly) be equipped with the liberal arts and (allegedly) be intellectually fulfilled, whatever that means. I will (allegedly) have a broader appreciation for the world in which I live, and in which I spend much of my time working at a job I learn to do as I go. If that job isn’t my thing, I’ll probably be able to change it. Those are the assumptions that I, an undergraduate liberal arts student, am running on. I hope I’ll be worth defending, or at least worth employing.