This is definitely something I’ve wondered myself. But having worked at a professional school now for almost one year in Career Services, I have found a new respect for my liberal arts education. Not to say it’s for everyone, but that like most things, the situation is just a bit more nuanced.
Perhaps not all programs need to be as long as they often are at many institutions. I completely empathize with the feeling that keeping students at an institution for longer than necessary is a scam, a part of the cycle of extracting money from students.
I’m not sure I agree with it, however. One of the issues I find amongst students at a professional college is that their understanding of the education-to-job pipeline is so formulaic: “If I study accounting, I will be an accountant,” or “If I study psychology, I will work in clinical psychology,” which leads to, “Am I screwed over if I concentrate in Entrepreneurship within my Business Management major?”
At this point in the conversation I take a pause to consider my own track to working in Career Services and Study Abroad. “No,” I tell these students, “If you want to work in the United States, you actually have a lot of flexibility.”
I keep using the term “siloed” – how did our students get so siloed? In countries like Germany and Austria where they “track” students as early as the age of 10, that’s where your major in university – or whatever you do even before university – matters. I am not as familiar with Australia, but I have been informed that the education-to-job pipeline is a bit more rigid there, too. Here in the US, the strict guidelines only apply to a few professions. To be a doctor, you need to go to med school. To be a lawyer, you need to go to law school. Here, I totally understand the argument for incorporating these studies into a bachelor’s degree – as it stands now, it doesn’t matter what you study in undergrad, you just need to do well on the right tests to pursue med or law school. But by that point, who wants to spend more money on education?
For the rest of us, the world is kind of our oyster. What matters isn’t entirely what you studied. In 2013, the Washington Post reported that only 27% of students ended up with a job related to their degree. The degree itself matters more than the subject matter.
I’m not in disagreement with the main point of the statement displayed above: higher education does need to be made affordable and less of a debt trap. In those same countries where the education-to-job pipeline is more rigid, higher education is also more affordable, or at least there’s a better loan scheme in place. In Germany, many students remain at university for six years. Their degree and coursework only takes up three years, but students often take their time, taking off a semester once in a while to do something else. Taking your time to explore academia is encouraged. University is also much more affordable, and fewer students attend – again, this can be a good thing and a bad thing. Because students are tracked at the age of 10, the system already sends an allotment of children down a vocational track based on testing at an early age.
All that to say, German students are lucky their education is so affordable (vocational education is just as affordable), and we in the US are lucky to have flexibility. I think there needs to be a middle ground however, because both systems come at their own costs.
As the push for assessment raises questions regarding the effectiveness of higher education institutions in the US to teach important skills is, such as critical thinking, the ability for students to think outside of the boxes of their own disciplines is also a concern. We won’t attain an “innovation economy” if the sociologist doesn’t dabble for a moment in astronomy, or if the mathematician doesn’t consider for a moment the historical complexities that exist in South Africa or India or Slovakia (or anywhere else that’s not here).
So, does a liberal arts education keep students away from “siloed” thinking, or is it a “complete scam for your money”? If the former, are the other, more affordable ways of providing liberal arts education in a way that succeeds at helping students with the following:
- Expanding their world view;
- Developing key skills demanded in our changing economy (critical thinking, oral/written communications, collaboration, etc.);
- Cultivating reflection practices and techniques.
More on solutions to come.