discussion questions about liberal arts education

The Most Frequently Asked Questions About Liberal Arts Education

Created by Liberal Arts Contributing Writer

A liberal arts education is all about asking questions. In fact, many of the critical-thinking skills and problem-solving methods that these degrees teach involve learning precisely how to ask the right questions in the first place.

A liberal arts education gives you the skills you need to answer the big questions in life… and the small ones.

So, if you’re here looking for some answers to the most frequently asked questions about getting a liberal arts education, you are already on the right track.

We’ve put together some comprehensive answers to some of the most common questions students bring up when considering a liberal arts and sciences education. If you’ve come to a place in life where you are serious about earning a degree in liberal studies, chances are good you have a lot of these same questions.

You’ve come to the right place to start your journey in search of answers.

Questions are critical to the entire liberal studies approach to learning. You’ve come to the right place to start your journey in search of answers:

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Your Biggest Liberal Arts Questions, Answered

You’ve probably had at least one relative ask you what having a liberal arts degree even means—or maybe you’ve even asked them . And that’s fair! The term “liberal arts” leaves a lot to be desired, especially since you don’t actually need to vote blue or be an artist to pursue a degree in it.

Liberal arts has been a cultural flashpoint of criticism in recent years; it’s easy to believe that an art history degree, for example, is nothing but a passion pursuit. But the liberal arts are fundamentally misunderstood, both in terms of the areas of study and the crucial societal importance that this degree confers.

So, what exactly does a liberal arts education encompass? Let’s break it down.

Q: What exactly does liberal arts mean? A: A liberal arts degree is grounded in the ideas of humanities and the arts and encompasses literature, philosophy, social and physical sciences and math. The “arts” in “liberal arts” aren’t limited to fine or performing arts, but denote a method of broad-based learning in many disciplines. The word “liberal” also gets lost in translation here—it doesn’t mean you’re ready to register as a Democrat. Rather, it’s rooted in the Latin word liberalis , or “free”. Mini lesson: Back in the Middle Ages , free citizens studied things like logic, rhetoric, geometry and arithmetic that would help them function successfully in society.

Q: What kind of majors would fall under a liberal arts degree? A: So. Many. Majors. Siena’s School of Liberal Arts is the largest of our three schools and encompasses more than 40 major, minor and certificate programs, including:

American Studies
Creative Arts
Modern Languages and Classics
Political Science
Religious Studies
Social Work

Q: What are you going to do with that degree? A: Did we just channel your parents? Here’s the deal (and here’s what you can tell them): A liberal arts degree effectively prepares you for thousands of potential careers. Most importantly, your future employers will know that you’re able to apply critical and creative thinking to your scope of work. A liberal arts education will help you to be adaptable in a rapidly evolving workforce, it will help you to synthesize a ton of different perspectives, and it will help you to communicate effectively with others. Trust us when we say this particular skill set is what sets candidates apart in the job market. (Further reading, if you’re interested: Yes, Employers Do Value Liberal Arts Degrees .)

Q: How else does a liberal arts degree set me up for future success? A: A major appeal of a liberal arts degree is that it allows students to both dive deep on subjects they’re drawn to while also broadening the scope of their experiences. At Siena especially, our liberal arts students are encouraged to challenge themselves by pursuing other possibilities outside of their main areas of interest—an inclination that will serve them well in the working world, where employees are often asked to take on responsibilities outside of their understanding or specialty.

Q. What if I don’t want to major in a liberal arts program, but still want to graduate with those skills? A. This is our favorite question, because the truth is: Business majors need a liberal arts education too . And science majors. And any major! No matter what you study, your college should have opportunities to help you hone all those liberal arts skills in other ways. So how does Siena tackle that? Through our core curriculum and first-year seminar offerings—which are not only informative and enlightening, and so relatable too. Check out our latest roster.

Got more q’s about the liberal arts? We got answers.

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What a Liberal Arts College Is and What Students Should Know

Liberal arts colleges traditionally emphasize broad academics and personal growth over specific professional training.

Liberal Arts Colleges Explained

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Students have freedom to explore at a liberal arts college, where there's an emphasis on broad academic inquiry.

Through smaller class sizes, wide-ranging curricula and tight-knit communities, liberal arts colleges are designed to develop intellectually curious students into free thinkers who are versatile in the professional workforce, experts say.

"The goal is to become broadly educated, well-rounded members of society that can understand lots of different domains of knowledge, learn how to learn and have a specialization of sorts," says Mark Montgomery, founder and CEO of Great College Advice, a college admissions consultancy with offices across the U.S.

Some common notions about liberal arts colleges are misconceptions, experts say. For example, the phrase "liberal arts" does not reflect a political alliance.

"Kids get mixed up," Montgomery says. "'Liberal' means freedom – freedom of the mind."

Marcheta Evans, president of Bloomfield College , a predominantly Black liberal arts institution in New Jersey, warns prospective students against making generalizations about student bodies at liberal arts colleges. Since the tuition for these schools is often higher than other universities, some assume only affluent students attend, which isn't true.

"Some liberal arts institutions have very privileged kids," she says. "But you also have institutions like mine, where a lot of kids are first-generation college students."

What Is a Liberal Arts College?

Liberal arts colleges are four-year undergraduate institutions that emphasize degrees in the liberal arts fields of study, including humanities, sciences and social sciences.

Maud S. Mandel, president of Williams College in Massachusetts, describes a liberal arts education as "an introduction to general knowledge." The Association of American Colleges and Universities notes its emphasis on integrating "academic and experiential learning" and developing skills "that are essential to work, citizenship, and life."

Most liberal arts colleges do not offer separate professional education programs, such as business and engineering schools, which are designed to give students specialized training for specific professional practice.

Students at liberal arts schools are typically required to take a number of general education courses, regardless of their major. At Pomona College in California, for example, students must fulfill a Social Institutions and Human Behavior requirement, and can do so by taking courses in areas such as anthropology, public policy analysis or sociology.

What Is the Difference Between Liberal Arts Colleges and Universities?

Though every liberal arts college is unique, most tend to differ from large universities in three ways:

Educational approach.

Liberal arts colleges tend to be smaller than large universities.

Every top 50 National Liberal Arts College in U.S. News rankings had an undergraduate enrollment of fewer than 5,000 students in fall 2020. The same was true at only eight of the top 50 National Universities ranked the same year by U.S. News.

Most liberal arts colleges do not offer graduate school programs, unlike other universities. They also tend to have small campuses and class sizes; in fact, many classes have fewer than 20 students.

Evans says some students find comfort in the sense of community that these more intimate settings can create. "Some students thrive in larger settings," she says. "Others need that smaller, family-like environment."

Compared to typical universities, students at liberal arts colleges can interact with their professors more easily and regularly because of lower student-teacher ratios, experts say.

"You have a relationship with your professors," Montgomery says. "It's a luxurious kind of education."

Peggy Baker, an independent educational consultant based in Asheville, North Carolina, says there's "real mentoring involved" in liberal arts college classrooms.

"I have students all the time who go to a liberal arts school and establish a relationship with a professor, and it makes all the difference," Baker says.

Students at liberal arts colleges typically have easier access to extracurricular activities than their counterparts at large universities, Montgomery says.

"The opportunities for leadership and participation, broadly, are greater," he says. "If you are trying to be the president of a club , you have much better odds of being it at a smaller college."

And most liberal arts colleges focus exclusively on undergraduate students. "You have that accessibility to research, or that lab assistant job, which would otherwise go to a graduate student," Baker explains.

Educational Approach

Most large universities offer Bachelor of Arts degrees, which use a liberal arts curriculum. This kind of degree emphasizes a broad education and so-called soft skills like communication and writing proficiency, analytical thinking and leadership ability.

At liberal arts colleges, Montgomery explains, all students follow this liberal arts curriculum design, regardless of major.

And he notes that students who have specific professional interests shouldn't exclude liberal arts colleges from their school search – these schools can also prepare students for careers in fields like engineering and business.

"You can still do engineering," he says. "There are places where you can do engineering and liberal arts together."

Many liberal arts colleges have Phi Beta Kappa Society chapters. Often referred to as PBK, this prestigious national academic honor society recognizes students who excelled academically in the arts and sciences at their college or university.

Many liberal arts colleges are private institutions, meaning they are not directly government-funded. As a result, liberal arts colleges are typically more reliant than public schools on tuition.

Prospective college students and their families sometimes turn away from liberal arts schools because of intimidating sticker prices – the total yearly cost of an education before any financial aid is applied. However, these numbers can be deceptive, experts point out.

Montgomery finds that liberal arts colleges are often generous in providing merit scholarships to students who demonstrate interest in their school.

"They want the students who want them," he says. "At some liberal arts colleges, 100% of the student body gets merit-based aid. In other words, no one pays the sticker price."

Evans encourages all students to consider the impact that financial aid could have on their education costs before ruling out small colleges. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid, commonly known as the FAFSA , helps determine a student's qualification for federal need-based aid such as the Pell Grant , loans and work-study . Most colleges require students to submit the form annually to be considered for institutional aid.

"Completing the FAFSA is one of the first steps you need to take before you even think about different institutions," Evans says.

When students factor merit and other aid considerations into their college pricing calculations, they may be pleasantly surprised by the final cost of attending a liberal arts college.

"There are dozens – if not hundreds – of high-quality liberal arts colleges in America that, in the end, will not be much more expensive, or maybe even the same price, as going to the flagship university in your home state," Montgomery says.

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The Value of a Liberal Arts Education is More Than Most Know

Columns appearing on the service and this webpage represent the views of the authors, not of The University of Texas at Austin.

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“What are you going to do with that?” Many new graduates will hear this question in the coming weeks.

For a business or computer science graduate, the answers seem obvious. What about someone studying a liberal arts field, like English or history or philosophy? A common misconception sees these as useless subjects or a waste of valuable resources. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Given the skills employers want, the traits we need in the next generation of leaders, and the qualities we value in our neighbors and friends, we might well ask the liberal arts grad, “What can’t you do with that?”

The main concern people have about liberal arts is marketability. Where are the jobs for people studying ancient Greek or African history? Everywhere. Because what those students are learning, alongside verb forms and dates, are the skills that appear time and again on top of employers’ wish lists. Skills such as persuasion, collaboration and creativity.

Does this mean that a liberal arts degree is as financially lucrative as computer science or petroleum engineering? No. But liberal arts majors do just fine in the workplace. Liberal arts students go on to earn good livings in a wide variety of fields, including technology.

In fact, the median annual income of a liberal arts major is just 8% lower than the median for all majors and more than one-third higher than the median income of people without a college degree.

Liberal arts offer not just financial value, but also personal, social and cultural values. The liberal arts take their name from the Latin word “liber,” which means “free.” Originally this referred to the education of free persons as distinct from slaves, but freedom is still at the root of the liberal arts. Liberal arts are a privilege of a free society, and the study of the liberal arts helps to keep us free.

Why is this? Contrary to what some would have us believe, our financial and social well-being depends on how we respond to the kinds of open-ended questions that liberal arts fields are asking. A computer scientist wants to invent a cool new app or technology. Whether he does a good job is measured by how much money his product earns.

As we see all too often, little thought is given to the social effects of these new technologies. They cause serious harm that people trained in writing computer code and making money may be unable or unwilling to address. Earnings can’t measure the things that most of us really care about when we think about new technologies.

This is where the liberal arts come in. The bedrock of a liberal arts education is the ability to understand a complex situation from many different viewpoints. To understand that the same information may look different to different people, or even to the same person at different times. We need the liberal arts to address questions that have no one right answer. And most of the important questions facing society are questions like this.

For instance, with all the technologies revolutionizing our society, how should we balance the need for accurate news and information with individual free speech? Where is the line between a legitimate business use of personal data and exploitation? Who gets to decide? So far, technology companies have done a lousy job of grappling with these questions. Some history majors, with their rich understanding of how complex forces shape society over time, would be a great idea.

Such skills have value in lots of places besides the workplace. The philosophy major on the church executive board is thinking about how the bedrock values of his community should inform decisions about replacing the roof or hiring a new Sunday school teacher. The English major participating in an environmental advocacy group can use her rhetorical and analytical skills to narrow the gap between the near-unanimous scientific consensus on climate change and political inaction on the issue.

The mistaken view that liberal arts are not financially valuable creates the more damaging idea that some fields of study have financial value, while others have social values. With liberal arts, we get both. Our society depends on it.

Deborah Beck is an associate professor of classics at The University of Texas at Austin.

A version of this op-ed appeared in The Hill .

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A Guide to the Discourse About Liberal Education

Some of our observations on the discursive categories we've identified..

Arguments about liberal arts accumulate slowly, almost imperceptibly, on the forest floor of higher education. The detritus of more than a century of episodes in the rhetorical life of liberal arts education, they are built up by cycles of the fierce argument, exuberant expansion, portents of doom, and beneficient forgetting that characterize modern higher education’s relation to the idea of the liberal arts.

Three years into our work as directors of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College, we’re newly conscious of the provenance of these claims about liberal arts that circulate within the contemporary American public sphere, across the global span of higher education, and backwards in time. Some of these claims are newer; others have long histories.

Everyone seems to have a take on the liberal arts. College admissions officers, authors of , earnestly-written books that about the future of academia, former college presidents, higher ed policy-makers, interested journalists, college professors, high-school guidance counselors, Twitter randos, conservative pundits, ed tech executives , business leaders. All of them try to offer a definition of “liberal arts” as they speak to their audiences. The googleable history of the idea is recited dutifully: we are reminded of the trivium and quadrivium; the fateful meeting between the American college and German research university is rehearsed. But far more history is forgotten, ignored, or side-stepped. In place of history, we list the virtues of liberal arts in a vague and comforting way. They vacillate between a melancholic yearning for a lost form of liberal arts education and a blustery confidence in liberal arts as a weapon with which to meet an uncertain and slightly menacing future. But few offer a tangible definition of the concept of liberal arts, and therefore few offer much confidence.

Part of the problem with defining liberal arts is that the concept seems so open that almost everyone can claim to be profoundly identified with it. The term is so plastic that “liberal arts” frequently serves in public discourse as an all-purpose scornful stand-in for any number of tenuously related things: for higher education, for educated elites, for the opposite of useful or instrumental education, even for any political disposition even slightly to the left of the far right.

And yet we can see some some persistent lineages emerge from out of the sea of formless talk that invokes “liberal arts”. Each of those strains has ties to a specific history of practice and ideology within higher education or public culture. Some align closely and intentionally with a particular agenda; others seem like accidental creations. Some trace a consistent line across more than a century; others have seen their fortunes rise dramatically and fall precipitously over time. But each of the twelve propositions we’ve identified intrigue us; they offer the seeds of research projects of various scales and types that we hope to undertake and support.

By uncovering the conditions in which they came into being, expanding the institutional landscape, repopulating the narratives with a wider array of individual figures, and turning towards the intractable problems they often both mark and gloss over, we hope to uncover both some more concrete definitions, particular practices, and a wider world of what liberal arts education has been, is now, and might be in the future.

——————————————————–

A Deeper Look

Uncertainty. The view that liberal arts is the best possible response to uncertain futures of work and life is particularly common in 2018. But it has a long history, arguably reaching all the way back into the medieval university or classical era and their assumptions about what a “free man” required from education in order to rule himself and the world around him. In the nineteenth century when Harvard President Charles Eliot introduced the elective course into higher education, he argued in part that individuals needed to make their own choices about what to learn in the process of their own unpredictable personal journey through life. Since then, the definition of liberal arts as unpredictability has been tied both to this romantic vision of individual flourishing and to the sense that white-collar or professional employment requires some measure of adaptability and flexibility to unforeseen circumstances. Unpredictability in this sense is both a justification of a liberal arts approach and an explanation of the variability of the courses and majors available within a liberal arts curriculum. Rarely, however, do liberal arts faculty and administrators think deeply about whether unpredictable conditions of study produce (or even resemble) the capacity to navigate uncertain future contingencies in work and life .

Recombination. The idea that the liberal arts is about the freedom of individual learners to make their own choices about subjects and methods they wish to learn and then to combine what they know in original or distinctive ways is possibly the most comforting of all to students, parents, professors, college presidents and most of the public. The physicist who is also a virtuoso pianist, the philosopher who designs solar-powered cars, the Shakespeare expert who writes white papers on the epidemology of ebola, are guaranteed a place in their alumni magazines, in the hearts of the faculty that taught them, and in the MacArthur genius grants of tomorrow. As with unpredictability, Charles Eliot’s revisionary insistence on the elective as the heart of American higher education is an important part of this story. But it’s also difficult to really pinpoint the structures or approaches in contemporary liberal arts institutions that consciously engender these kinds of recombinant outcomes–and hard to shake the suspicion that other double majors, other students with uniquely conceived courses of study, never really reconcile or connect the divergent threads of their education; liberal arts institutions like the claim a share of the credit for the achievements of its graduates, yet rarely assume responsibility for their failures or disappointments. Nor is it easy to separate out the legacies of a four-year undergraduate education from later experiences that might more richly inform or shape a distinctive fusion of divergent forms of knowledge and skill in a given graduate.

Autodidactism. Almost as comforting is the proposition that liberal arts students “learn how to learn”, that they are acquiring meta-knowledge of disciplines, methods, and skills that sets them apart from people who have not had this kind of education. While many institutions design disciplinary and interdisciplinary structures to emphasize method and meta-knowledge, this claim appears as often in contexts where students encounter disciplines with fiercely specific and highly bounded methods; in this latter case, “learning how to learn” must arise from the proximity of different learning experiences or from the particular pedagogy of Like many assertions about liberal education, it’s difficult to separate from the abilities and social capital that many students carry into higher education from the benefits they reap from it four years later. It also can be difficult to clearly trace how separate disciplines that may hold themselves to have specific and highly bounded methods and epistemologies nevertheless produce this metaknowledge in liberal learners.

Critical Thinking. “Learning how to learn” is miles more specific and tangible than another very common claim, that liberal arts education is “critical thinking”. In a sense, “critical thinking” and “liberal arts” are a match made in heaven–that is, of two often-invoked ideas that can mean almost nothing and almost anything all at once, and that can in fact each mean something deeply important and brimming with potential. Thinking, slightly modified; the value-added imagined here is “critical,” which holds the bag for everything that education may be said to have done while also preserving an alibi. Critical thinking attempts to strip ideology and even any particular content away from the idea of liberal education; it invokes the autonomy of individuals, their ability to think independently of and about the conditions of their education.

Humanities. Critical thinking is therefore very different for those uses of liberal arts to mean humanities disciplines pure and simple – as often seen in far-right trolling (snowflake liberal arts majors) as well as in a more subtle, background assumption within the culture of academia itself. The association of the two is not unfounded: as Laurence Veysey points out, the defenders of “liberal learning” who armed themselves against the rise of the practical or utility-driven research university expressly identified themselves as humanists opposed to new disciplinary forms of scientific inquiry. In the swirl of current anxieties about science majors, those older views are sometimes pulled up as sediments that color ongoing conversations and deliberations with an irritable turbidity. At the same time, almost no one in the contemporary environment seriously advocates framing a liberal arts curriculum as an exclusively humanistic one.

Core Curriculum, Western Tradition. Though perhaps there is some element of that framing in various academic projects that define themselves as upholding “traditional” visions of the liberal arts: Columbia University’s Core Curriculum and St. John’s College’s “Great Books” approach, for example, as well as a number of religious colleges. With varying degrees of comfort, most of these institutional frameworks not only see themselves as defining liberal arts in terms of adherence to past approaches but even more specifically as connected to the “Western tradition”. Even for institutions that have no interest in defining liberal education in these terms, there is a seemingly unavoidable degree to which the concept references a specific history of teaching and institution-building in Western Europe. The rise of movements to decolonize or more thoroughly universalize university curricula are at least partially a result of this lingering connection. It’s hard to ignore the degree to which the defense of liberal arts is often undertaken by white male authors (both inside and outside of academia), but many of the virtues claimed for liberal learning as an approach have potential analogues in other historical traditions of formal education in East and South Asia and perhaps elsewhere. To us, at least, it feels as if the persistent, sometimes unspoken, connection between ideas about liberal learning and “the Western tradition” creates some unfortunate constraints on its future–but this is also a conversation so thoroughly implicated in long-standing culture wars that it is hard to engage it in a useful or interesting way.

Anti-Vocational. Far more interesting to us is the intricate, contradictory domain of claims about the relationship between liberal learning and the work that its graduates undertake subsequently in life. To a great extent, we think this is the single most interesting thread that we would like to unravel and trace. The proposition that a liberally educated person must not be intentionally prepared for a single specific career reverberates all up and down the timeline of liberal arts as an idea, though in radically different contexts in classical and medieval institutions, and even in the 19th Century American academy. No other idea produces so many invocations–and misrepresentations–of the classical and medieval conceptualization of the educated person. The history of higher education in the United States is a series of confrontations between practicality and philosophy, utility and character-building, specificity of professional training and generality of liberal learning. The contemporary American debate about higher education, whether staged on Twitter, in family living rooms, in diners, in legislatures, or in faculty meetings, is drawn compulsively to the question of whether and how higher education should prepare students for future careers, and whether or not it already does so in some fashion. These conversations criss-cross a riotous range of informed descriptions of the actual curricula and pedagogy of higher education, mythological visions of college in the past and present, unexamined assumptions about the process of learning, and anxious marginally-informed pronouncements about the present and future of work and social transformation. We’ve decided that this theme is our greatest area of current engagement for the Aydelotte: there is so much to interpret and study within this domain, and the answers are so urgent for the present moment. Status Quo. At least some working understandings of liberal arts, on the other hand, amount to a quiet and simple blank-check benediction for the status quo, either at particular colleges or universities or across academia. Meaning, when asked “what do you mean by ‘liberal arts’”, at least some institutions effectively answer by saying, “Whatever we’re doing this second? That’s liberal arts”. This is less shallow than it might seem: what this approach really means to say is that existing structures of faculty governance and administrative management are trustworthy custodians of the meanings and implementation of liberal arts, and that liberal education arises as an emergent form out of the interaction of their various decisions. Considering that contemporary anxieties about higher education are far less novel or unprecedented than they are frequently described as being, it makes a certain kind of sense to serenely assert a kind of custodial duty to liberal learning and to carry on with that duty without being overly distracted by any given moment of supposed controversy or threat. Small Colleges. In a similar vein, there are more than a few definitions of liberal arts that simply assert that the term is defined not by concepts or histories but that it is a proxy for a specific kind of institution, namely small American colleges that are focused substantially or entirely on undergraduate education. The common acronym SLAC expresses this neatly: “small liberal-arts college”. This seems to us to be both true enough (that the term tends to invoke small colleges) and completely uninteresting. If liberal arts is simply a synonym for selective small colleges that collectively educate only a teeny fraction of the students graduating with bachelor’s degrees in the United States, it certainly cannot carry the weight of all the other expectations and anxieties that surround it.

Citizenship. Finally, we’re interested in but also puzzled by a powerful, long-standing idea about liberal education that often haunts almost every other invocation of the concept. Namely, that liberal learning is peculiarly suited to the formation of character, the shaping of morality, or the creation of civic virtue. This is a proposition of long-standing, beloved by college presidents in 1875, 1925, and 2018, even if some of the descriptive vocabulary of virtues attributed to liberal learning shifts over time. “Ethical intelligence”, “global citizenship”, “social justice”, are in some sense the descendants of other virtuous attributes that colleges and universities claimed to hone or awaken in young people a century earlier. These claims puzzle us because in some sense they propose an empirical standard that perhaps unsurprisingly educational institutions have been in no hurry to test or examine further. Are graduates of liberal arts institutions better citizens by some measure? (And what would be “better”?) Are they ethically intelligent? (Are scholars who study ethics, for example, in any sense more likely to be ethical?) Any of these questions, if they could be answered in the affirmative through any kind of evidence of any kind, would pose a second set of questions: what is it about liberal education that is producing such an outcome? How do we know this isn’t better described as “class formation”? (Which, if it were, would not be self-evidently bad to everyone who expresses it–it’s just that that would be different than what educational institutions commonly imagine as their intentional practices.) We recognize that there are many interesting sentiments and histories bubbling under the surface of these kinds of claims, but for the moment, we are inclined to push them aside until we can think of a way to tackle them usefully.

Character. This theme could also just as easily be titled “social or class reproduction”. Higher education outside the United States has been more explicit regarding this as a function of the university. The major public university systems of many European countries and their former colonies have long used qualifying examinations and other mechanisms to sort young adults into overtly class-linked hierarchies closely connected to particular kinds of employment. A small fragment of institutions that have conventionally described themselves as training for elite government and corporate leaders and a handful of esteemed professions, such as Oxford, Cambridge or the Sorbonne, have claimed to be involved in building “character”, a sort of mannerly public morality that once upon a time stretched from how to behave on the polo field or while eating ortolans to how to act in public when your spouse has an affair or when feeling in middle age that life has ceased to have joy and meaning. Some tie to older ideas of liberal education–the training of a ‘free’ citizen–has been visible within this commitment to cultivating character.

“Character” in the American academy has a more complicated and tortured history. As Veysey observes, the ascendant research university in the latter half of the 19th Century set itself against the “liberal education” of many private and religious institutions by promising that the research university was open to all citizens, and could offer to all students a kind of socioeconomic mobility untainted by “character”. A student could learn the arts and skills needed by a fast-paced industrial society, skills whose value could be stripped of the need for embedded or inherited cultural capital. With those skills, a graduate’s horizon was said to be unlimited. Veysey notes that for a good while, the response of the defenders of liberal education to this critique was not to deny the accusation but to embrace it, to agree that liberal education did in fact refine and extend the social virtues of the scions of elite or haut-bourgeois families. Nevertheless, in the early 20th Century, many small college and private universities adopted some of the features of the research university and with them began to scuff over or obscure the degree to which character and social standing were synonymous or connected, either by extending the benefits of character to anyone who might matriculate or preaching the importance of character to the proper use of professional or technical skills.

The link between liberal learning and the shaping of character–or many related ways to describe some combination of manners, ethics, behavior and affect–has remained strong up to the present in American higher education even as that connection also produces discomfort, embarrassment and anger. A prominent strain of criticism of the contemporary academy by writers like Mark Edmundson and William Deresiewicz complains of the extent to which higher education has abandoned the forging of character. Many make the opposite charge: that liberal learning is still tied too closely to the reproduction of the specific cultural identity of an older white, male establishment elite and hostile to everyone else. Faculty and administrators often look desperately for ways to renarrate or redescribe ‘character’ either as a technical-philosophical skill (“emotional intelligence”, “self-presentation”, “ethical intelligence”, “cultivating humanity”) or to re-situate it within larger and more open social formations (“global citizenship”, “cosmopolitanism”, “pluralism”).

At the same moment, the undeniably intensified role of higher education in producing social class in the United States has become a profoundly unsettling subject within academia and an explicit premise of public conversation about academia, not to mention an important underpinning of recent American politics. Here the theme of anti-vocationalism gets a particularly intense inflection from its relationship to both character-producing and class-producing visions of liberal education. So this is an area of both strength and weakness within the body politic of academia that we intend to persistently explore and prod at even as we are also aware of the jangled nerves and knotted musculature that flinch as a result of such prodding.

This taxonomy of “liberal arts” and its meanings is both a product of research and a guide to research. We can see meanings of the term that are banally or historically shallow, and others that have a tendency to be anodyne or superficial. We see others that are zones of heavy, if often unreflective, contention both within academia and between academia and its myriad publics. It is enough to keep us occupied for a long time; we hope with some useful results.

Timothy Burke's main field of specialty is modern African history, specifically southern Africa, but he has also worked on U.S. popular culture and on computer games.

Timothy Burke
Higher Education
Liberal Arts
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What Does Liberal Arts Mean?

A liberal arts education offers an expansive intellectual grounding in all kinds of humanistic inquiry.

By exploring issues, ideas and methods across the humanities and the arts, and the natural and social sciences, you will learn to read critically, write cogently and think broadly. These skills will elevate your conversations in the classroom and strengthen your social and cultural analysis; they will cultivate the tools necessary to allow you to navigate the world’s most complex issues.

A liberal arts education challenges you to consider not only how to solve problems but also trains you to ask which problems to solve and why, preparing you for positions of leadership and a life of service to the nation and all of humanity. We provide a liberal arts education to all of our undergraduates, including those who major in engineering.

As President Christopher Eisgruber, Class of 1983, stated in his 2013 installation address: “[A] liberal arts education is a vital foundation for both individual flourishing and the well-being of our society.”

A commitment to the liberal arts is at the core of Princeton University's mission.

This means:

Princeton is a major research university with a profound and distinctive commitment to undergraduate education.

Our curriculum encourages exploration across disciplines, while providing a central academic experience for all undergraduates.

You will have extraordinary opportunities at Princeton to study what you are passionate about and to discover new fields of interest.

Students who elect to major in the natural sciences or engineering, for example, also take classes in history, languages, philosophy, the arts and a variety of other subjects.

You could major in computer science and earn a certificate in theater. Or major in African American studies and earn a certificate in entrepreneurship. Many other options are possible through the range of Princeton's concentrations and interdisciplinary certificate programs.

You will be exposed to novel ideas inside and outside the classroom that may change your perspective and broaden your horizons.

We value learning and research as a source of personal discovery and fulfillment — as a pleasurable and enlightening experience in its own right. But it is also a means to an end, in preparing you to live a meaningful life in service to the common good.

Your Princeton education will facilitate your progress along whatever path you choose to pursue, and you will continually rely on what you learned here in your career and in your life.

Our graduates are prepared to address future innovations and challenges that we may not be able to even imagine today.

We hope you will take time to explore how a commitment to the liberal arts is part of what makes Princeton special. Consider our 30+ m ajors and 50+ minors ; discover the research conducted by our distinguished faculty; engage with the range of superlative visiting scholars and artists we invite to campus each year; and imagine the quality of conversations you’ll be able to have with your professors and your peers.

Humanities Sequence

In Princeton's yearlong humanities sequence—team-taught by professors from a variety of academic disciplines—undergraduates are immerse in texts that span 2,500 years of civilization.

Integrated Science Curriculum

Integrated Science is a revolutionary introductory science curriculum intended for students considering a career in science. This year-long course prepares first-year students for a major in any of the core sciences while bridging meaningfully across other disciplines.

Engineering Studies

The School of Engineering and Applied Science challenges students to both solve problems and understand which problems are important by emphasizing fundamental principles of engineering with their connections to society.

I came to Princeton because I wanted a liberal arts education that would enable me to pursue multiple interests rigorously and deeply. I concentrated in physics, but the courses that most shaped my intellectual life were in constitutional law, political theory and comparative literature.

- Christopher L. Eisgruber ’83, Princeton University president

Life & Letters Magazine

The Value of the Liberal Arts

By Hina Azam September 20, 2022 facebook twitter email

Those of us who teach in liberal arts colleges are passionate about the value of a liberal arts education. But for those outside of academia – even for those who might have received a degree in UT’s College of Liberal Arts – the precise meaning of “liberal arts” can be murky. What, exactly, is meant by the “liberal arts”? What is the history of the idea, and how does it translate into the educational concept we know as a “liberal-arts curriculum,” or, more broadly, a “liberal education”? What is the value of a liberal arts education to both individual and collective life? This essay presents a brief overview of the idea, history, purposes, and values of liberal arts education, so that you, our readers, may understand the passion that inspires our faculty’s teaching and scholarship, and be similarly inspired.

What are the Liberal Arts?

The idea of the liberal arts originates in ancient Greece and was further developed in medieval Europe. Classically understood, it combined the four studies of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music – known as the quadrivium – with the three additional studies of grammar, rhetoric, and logic – known as the trivium . These artes liberales were meant to teach both general knowledge and intellectual skills, and thus train the mind. This training of the mind as well as this foundational body of content knowledge and intellectual skills was regarded by scholars and educators as necessary for all human beings – and especially a society’s leaders – in order to live well, both individually and collectively.

These liberal arts were distinguished from vocational or clinical arts, such as law, medicine, engineering, and business. These latter were conceived as servile arts – i.e. arts that served concrete production or construction. These productive/constructive arts were also known as artes mechanicae , “mechanical arts,” which included crafts such as weaving, agriculture, masonry, warfare, trade, cooking, and metallurgy. In contrast to the vocational or mechanical arts, the liberal arts put greater weight on intellectual skills – the ability to think and communicate clearly, and to analyze and solve problems. But more distinctively, the liberal arts emphasized learning and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, independent of immediate application. The liberal arts taught not only bodies of knowledge, but – more dynamically – how to go about finding and creating knowledge – that is, how to learn. Finally, the liberal arts taught not only how to think and do, but also how to be – with others and with oneself, in the natural world and the social world. They were thus centrally concerned with ethics.

Notably, the term “liberal arts” has nothing to do with liberalism in the contemporary political or partisan sense; the opposite of “liberal” here is not “conservative.” Rather, the term goes back to the Latin root signifying “freedom,” as opposed to imprisonment or subjugation. Think here of the English word “liberty.” The liberal arts were historically connected to freedom in that they encompassed the types of knowledge and skills appropriate to free people, living in a free society. The term “art” in this phrase also must be understood correctly, for it does not refer to “art” as we use it today in its creative sense, to denote the fine and performing arts. Rather, from the Latin root ars , “art” is here used to refer to skill or craft. The “liberal arts,” then, may be thought of as liberating knowledges, or alternatively, the skills of being free.

What is a Liberal Arts Education ?

A liberal (arts) education is a curriculum designed around imparting core knowledge and skills through engagement with a wide range of subjects and disciplines. This core knowledge is taught through general education courses typically drawn from the humanities, (creative) arts, natural sciences, and social sciences. The humanities include disciplines such as language, literature, poetry, rhetoric, philosophy, religion, history, law, geography, archaeology, anthropology, politics, and classics. Natural sciences include subjects such as geology, chemistry, physics, and life sciences such as biology. Social sciences comprise disciplines such as sociology, economics, linguistics, psychology, and education. Through a core curriculum or general education courses, students gain a basic knowledge of the physical and natural world as well as of human ideas, histories, and practices.

A liberal arts education comprises more than learning only content, but also honing skills and cultivating values. Intellectual and practical skills at the heart of the liberal arts are reading comprehension, inquiry and analysis, critical and creative thinking, written and oral communication, information and quantitative literacy, teamwork and problem-solving. Values that are central to liberal education are personal and social responsibility, civic knowledge and engagement, intercultural knowledge and competence, ethical reasoning and action, and lifelong learning.

Why a Liberal Education? Purposes and Values

Four overarching purposes anchor the idea of an education in the liberal arts. One of those is liberty . As mentioned above, the traditional idea of the liberal arts was an education that befitted a free person, one who was fit to participate freely in the life of society. The modern casting of this idea is that a broad education does not limit one to a particular profession or occupation, but rather, is meant for any life path – it prepares the mind for a variety of possible futures and for constructive participation in a civil democratic society. The interconnection between liberal education and human freedom cannot be over-emphasized, and it was at the forefront of the minds of the great political theorists and educators of the western tradition. Those with insufficient knowledge and skills would easily fall prey to demagogues and agents of chaos, and pervasive ignorance and lack of intellectual skill would eat away at a polity’s foundations. Only an informed citizenry – who had familiarity with and foundational understanding in the major areas of knowledge, and who had the requisite skills to both process existing information and seek out reliable new information – would be able to uphold and maintain a democratic society and stave off a decline into tyranny and despotism. As Thomas Jefferson, a major architect of the American public university, held, “Wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government.” [1]

Another central purpose of a liberal arts education is the inculcation of the principle of human worth. This purpose is built on values collectively known as humanism : the idea that human life, individual and collective, has intrinsic value; the idea that human beings are endowed with rights to life, liberty, property, and a number of other rights that we know as “human rights”; that human beings are fundamentally equal, even if they are not the same, and that that equality should translate into both political and legal equality. This ideal of humanism is not in opposition to religious beliefs and practices; however, it regards the public sphere as one in which all should be able to participate regardless of religious beliefs and practices. Humanism mirrors the principle of a common or shared humanity, even while recognizing differences of experience, perspective, and resources. This vision is at the heart of that facet of liberal arts known as the humanities . Writes Robert Thornett, “Humanities is, in fact, education in how to be a human being.” [2] A liberal arts education exposes learners to diverse types of knowledge – which allow for understanding and empathy with others – within a humanistic framework that aims for deeper unity and synthesis. This approach to knowledge serves as a bulwark against social, political and ideological forces that seek to drive wedges between human beings, and that all too often culminate in violence and oppression.

A third purpose of liberal education is to provide a space for contemplation of truth and virtue , based on the conviction that such contemplation is necessary for the free mind, and that informed explorations of these notions lead to the formation of better human beings. The liberal arts are where students have opportunity to consider the “big questions”: What is true? What is good? What is just? What is beautiful? This contemplation is what fires the imaginations of our students, and what makes the liberal arts curriculum unlike any other curriculum. Vartan Gregorian explains the unique character of liberal arts education, writing that “the deep-seated yearning for knowledge and understanding endemic to human beings is an ideal that a liberal arts education is singularly suited to fulfill.” [3]

A fourth value of liberal arts education is its emphasis on the skills of learning , and of constructing knowledge out of information. We live in an increasingly complex information environment, where the sheer quantity of information – and its intentional manipulation into disinformation – overwhelms people’s abilities to make sense of it all. Without sufficient training, people are less equipped to find reliable information, to understand what they encounter, and to process that information, mentally and emotionally, into rational knowledge that can form the basis of ethical evaluation and action . This is a matter of grave importance for all human beings – in their capacity as students, citizens, consumers, workers, and people in relationships. Gregorian long ago identified the problem of information overload, and the function of education, in an interview with Bill Moyers: “Unfortunately, the information explosion … does not equal knowledge. … So, we’re facing a major problem: how to structure information into knowledge. Because … there are great possibilities of manipulating our society by inundating us with undigested information… paralyzing our choices by giving so much that we cannot possibly digest it.” [4]

Given this paralyzing deluge of information, he continues, “The teaching profession, the universities, have to provide connections … connections between subjects, connections between disciplines … to provide some kind of intellectual coherence.” In the final analysis, suggests Gregorian, “Education’s sole function is now, possibly, [to] provide an introduction to learning.”

The purposes and values outlined above cannot easily be fulfilled outside of an intentional liberal arts curriculum. One does meet people who are driven to read widely and to pursue lifelong learning; to develop skills of information critique and lucid oral and written communication; to hold steadily to the vision of a shared humanity and humane ethical conduct; to undertake the ethical burden of preserving political liberties and civil rights; to engage in sustained contemplation of truth and practice of virtue; to perceive the interconnectedness of different spheres of knowledge and therefore of our world; and to develop the facility to synthesize chaotic data and irrational information into rational and cogent knowledge. But these goals are far more difficult to achieve outside of the structured, collective, and compulsory activities of the college classroom and away from teachers whose minds are perpetually set to these concerns. For too many, such integrated learning is out of reach or undervalued. Meanwhile, the insufficient attainment and integration of broad knowledge, intellectual skills, and ethical reflection is wreaking havoc on our society and national culture; on our quality of life morally, intellectually, psychologically, and physically; and finally, on our planet, which is increasingly unable to withstand humanity’s relentless onslaught and is fast losing the capacity to sustain its assailant.

Liberal-arts education is not found in any one course, classroom, or teacher. It is a composite formation, attained over time through series of courses and learning opportunities that together coalesce in the minds of students. Each instructor, and each course, contributes elements that are oriented toward the purposes identified above. It is through the process of seeing the interconnections between different areas of knowledge, using diverse intellectual skills, that the human mind gains the capacity for liberation.

[1] https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/genesis-university-virginia

[2] Robert Thornett, “What Are College Students Paying For?” at The Quillette , June 2, 2022 [ https://quillette.com/2022/06/02/what-are-college-students-paying-for-the-stephen-curry-effect-and-getting-back-to-basics/

[3] Historian and former Brown University President Vartan Gregorian, in his essay “American Higher Education: An Obligation to the Future” at https://higheredreporter.carnegie.org/introduction/ .

[4] “Vartan Gregorian: Living in the Information Age,” interview with Bill Moyers, at https://billmoyers.com/content/vartan-gregorian/ .

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Liberal Arts & Sciences

Plan Your Academic Journey

The undergraduate degree is designed with flexibility in mind: you set your own academic goals, and we'll help you plan coursework to meet them—while also ensuring you receive a broad liberal arts and sciences education.

Liberal Arts & Sciences Education

Academic exploration across disciplines.

As former President Lawrence Bacow stated in his 2018 installation address, “Given the necessity today of thinking critically… a broad liberal arts education has never been more important.”

What is a "liberal arts & sciences" education?

Commitment to liberal arts & sciences is at the core of Harvard College’s mission: before students can help change the world, they need to understand it. The liberal arts & sciences offer a broad intellectual foundation for the tools to think critically, reason analytically and write clearly. These proficiencies will prepare students to navigate the world’s most complex issues, and address future innovations with unforeseen challenges. Shaped by ideas encountered and created, these new modes of thinking will prepare students for leading meaningful lives, with conscientious global citizenship, to enhance the greater good.

Harvard offers General Education courses that show the liberal arts and sciences in action. They pose enduring questions, they frame urgent problems, and they help students see that no one discipline can answer those questions or grapple with those problems on its own. Students are challenged to ask difficult questions, explore unfamiliar concepts, and indulge in their passion for inquiry and discovery across disciplines.

Concentrations

You have many options when pursuing your Harvard degree. We offer more than 3,700 courses in 50 undergraduate fields of study, which we call concentrations. A number of our concentrations are interdisciplinary.

Double Concentrations

For students interested in deeply pursuing two areas of study, the option to declare a double concentration was added in the 2022-2023 academic year. Double concentrations allow students to pursue two distinct, in-depth paths of study that do not substantially overlap. Students who pursue a double concentration do not need to write a senior thesis unless one of the fields of study is an honors-only field.

Joint Concentrations

A joint concentration allows students to combine two fields that are each an undergraduate concentration and integrate them into a coherent field of study. Joint concentrations culminate with an interdisciplinary senior thesis written in one of the concentrations only. In essence, joint concentrations allow an undergraduate to blend two concentrations into one cohesive unit of classes.

Special Concentrations

Special concentrations allow you to craft a degree plan that meets a uniquely challenging academic goal. This could be an unprecedented area of research or a combination of disciplines not covered by our current offerings.

To create your own special concentration, you must submit a petition to the Standing Committee on Special Concentrations, which reviews each plan of study on an individual basis.

Harvard College Curriculum

Approximately a third of courses towards your degree fulfill Harvard College requirements. This includes classes in the areas of General Education, Distribution, Quantitative Reasoning with Data, Expository Writing, and Language.

“We want Gen Ed to be the kind of courses faculty have always dreamed of teaching — and the kind students never forget.”*

For detailed explanations of academic requirements, consult the Harvard College Curriculum .

Components of your degree

General education.

Harvard's Program in General Education connects students to the world beyond the classroom by focusing on urgent problems and enduring questions. Students take one course in each of four categories: Aesthetics & Culture; Ethics & Civics; Histories, Societies, Individuals; as well as Science & Technology in Society.

Distribution

The distribution requirement exposes students to the range of scholarly disciplines offered at Harvard. Students take one course in each of the three main divisions of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences: Arts and Humanities; Social Sciences; as well as Science, Engineering, and Applied Sciences.

Quantitative Reasoning with Data

Quantitative Reasoning with Data courses teach students how to think critically about data. Students learn the computational, mathematical, and statistical techniques needed to understand data. They’ll also learn how to use those techniques in the real world, where data sets are imperfect and incomplete, sometimes compromised, always contingent. Finally, they’ll reflect on all the questions raised by our current uses of data — questions that are social and ethical and epistemological.

Expository Writing

The writing requirement is a one-semester course offered by the Harvard College Writing Program that focuses on analytic composition and revision. Expos courses are taken as first-year students and are taught in small seminars focusing on writing proficiency in scholarly writing. Students meet one-on-one with instructors (called preceptors) regularly to refine writing skills. Depending on the result of the summer writing placement exam, some students take a full year of Expos.

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*Quote by: Amanda Claybaugh, Dean of Undergraduate Education

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The enduring relevance of a liberal-arts education

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The Workforce Relevance of Liberal Arts Education

Mit j-wel & pragya systems publish white paper with recommendations for advising, curricula, credential models, and collaboration.

By Vijay Kumar, Ramji Raghavan, George Westerman, Susan Young

Introduction

Liberal arts colleges and universities are currently facing substantial challenges. Small colleges are closing at unprecedented rates. Undergraduate and graduate school enrollment dropped by 2.5% from fall 2019 to fall 2021 (NPR, December 17, 2020). For many colleges, COVID-19 added severe disruption when they were already struggling with decreasing enrollment trends. Prospective students may now struggle to see liberal arts colleges — often viewed as steeped in tradition rather than in technology — as a worthy investment to help prepare them for careers upon graduation.

While technical skills are critical for many careers, employers are increasing their focus on human skills . These human skills, such as critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration, initiative, integrity, and comfort with ambiguity, complement technical skills and cannot be directly replicated by today’s technology.

The human skills matrix contains 24 durable skills that workers need to thrive in today’s rapidly evolving organizations, across civil and cultural literacy, digital literacy, organizational literacy, and financial literacy. Categories of human skills include Thinking, Interacting, Managing Ourselves, and Leading.

Monster’s The Future of Work 2021: Global Hiring Outlook reported that when employers were asked to name the top skills they want in employees, they cited soft skills such as dependability, teamwork/ collaboration, flexibility and problem-solving. According to LinkedIn’s 2019 Global Talent Trends report , 89 percent of recruiters say when a hire doesn’t work out, it usually comes down to a lack of soft skills. (SHRM — May 28, 2021)

Liberal arts institutions place strong emphasis on building these critical human skills. Their curricula encourage students to develop creative and interdisciplinary thinking to tackle significant challenges. The goal of liberal arts education is not simply to advance learning for its own sake, in a vacuum, but in a larger community and global context. In an opinion piece in The New Republic , Lewis & Clark President Wim Wiewel says:

“We must change the all too prevalent but false narrative that academics value theory over practice, that ivy-covered walls separate us from real-world problems.”

For many institutions, bridging the education/workforce gap — whether real or perceived — will require extensive transformation.

To understand the workforce relevance of liberal arts education, MIT J-WEL and Pragya Systems assembled a group of senior campus leaders for a series of roundtable discussions. Participants discussed the importance of learners having the right combination of technical and human skills, as well as access to personalized, data-driven, and holistic career, academic, and co-curricular advice.

The Workforce Relevance of Liberal Arts Education white paper presents perspectives and case studies from the participating liberal arts institutions around four key areas:

Advising : providing holistic advice to help students develop and articulate career-relevant skills;
Curriculum : redesigning curriculum and linking learning experiences to career skills;
Credential models : supporting a broader segment of learners with new types of credentials; and
Collaborations among industry, alumni, and organizations.

Liberal arts colleges have always offered advising to students for both academic and career topics. However, career advice typically comes toward the end of the student’s degree, rather than earlier when it could help them construct an ongoing progression of growth in academic and career readiness. Many of the discussion participants discussed a need to rethink the ways that their institutions structure and manage processes such as academic advising and career services. Traditionally, academic advising is provided by faculty, while career advising is done by staff members. This separation of the two roles creates a noticeable disconnect between academics and career-relevant experiences and skills. The siloed nature of advising can present a significant obstacle to helping students integrate academics and career realities during their educational journeys.

One important step is to re-engage faculty in the career advising process. Quinnipiac University’s College of Arts and Sciences has shifted from its previous model of advising to one that incorporates faculty in a new way. While many students would ask faculty for career advice, the school’s old model divided advisory duties among faculty academic advisors who assisted students with course selection and progress towards graduation, and a single career advisor who assisted the entire student body with the fundamentals of applying for jobs (resumes, interview skills, etc.). Many students had established relationships with particular faculty members but had not done so with career services. They often wouldn’t engage with career services until they were nearly finished with their time at school.

“Traditionally, academic and career advising are separate roles — creating a noticeable disconnect between academic and career-relevant experiences and skills.”

The College of Arts and Sciences at Quinnipiac’s new CAS360 advising model is an integrated academic and career advising structure driven by faculty academic advisors, who are full-time, tenure-track faculty in a student’s major, and supported by professional career staff. With the faculty now in the lead role in the ongoing advising process, students can receive career advice from faculty who know them well. Current ratios allocate approximately 15 students to one faculty member. Career staff work individually with students on career issues — as referred by faculty — and also manage employer relationships, facilitate employer / faculty interactions, and plan college-wide events. Students are also able to go to the career office for walk-in advising to answer more general questions. This new model of advising allows faculty to more directly connect academic activities to careers and work in-depth with students, while also providing plenty of support and resources for faculty.

“The integrated advising role of faculty helps bridge the divide between what students are learning in classroom and what they need to learn to prepare for their careers.”

As part of Wheaton College ’s new curriculum design, which is described in more detail in the next section, the advising process has become more integrated into the curriculum. Students receive consistent advising around a structured agenda of questions. The primary advisor is a faculty member who advises students in cohorts of approximately eight people. Faculty are able to get to know students and their goals, gauge the career-relevant skills students need, and infuse their academic courses with experiential learning opportunities. The integrated advising role of faculty helps bridge the divide between what students are learning in classroom and what they need to learn to prepare for their careers.

As with advising, many liberal arts colleges are revisiting the overall curriculum design to determine if there might be ways to improve students’ career readiness. Participants from the liberal arts institutions discussed the challenges of identifying gaps and shortcomings in current curricula and improving academic offerings for students to be better prepared for work. Colleges are also looking into effective ways to incorporate more experiential learning opportunities to ensure that technical and human skills are integrated into the curriculum.

Davidson College has recently re-evaluated ways it might create more pathways to careers for liberal arts students, designing pedagogy around measurable skills in “adjacent academies” of liberal arts and technical skills. For example, it piloted digital bootcamps to better prepare liberal arts graduates for jobs in the tech industry, focused on teaching core digital skills and building tech literacy. These bootcamps were designed to be complementary to traditional degree pathways. Yet, these experiences went beyond teaching technical skills. In surveys, students identified the opportunity to develop human skills such as “growth mindset,” “learning how to learn,” and “expanding social capital” as the greatest benefits of the program.

Similarly, Dean College identified a need for technical skills and human skills to become better integrated. The college created a first-year experience program to help students understand the skill sets they need and be able to better articulate their skills to future employers.

“Curricular gaps and shortcomings in building career readiness need to be identified and addressed, and opportunities for experiential learning need to be expanded.”

Wheaton College has recently undertaken a curriculum transformation process. Teams of faculty, students, and staff are working to design and implement an updated curriculum that better prepares students for their careers. The college had not deeply examined its curriculum model in 15 years, and its once innovative “connections” curriculum was being imitated by many institutions.

During the redesign, team members actively sought out alumni feedback, and found that mid-career alumni felt very prepared for the working environment — but it had taken them ten years after receiving their degree to feel prepared. Clearly, the new curriculum needed to do more to prepare students for work during their time at Wheaton, so they could be more career-ready upon graduation.

The Wheaton team designed a flexible curriculum, called Compass , with many pathways. Requirements for Compass include an interdisciplinary first-year experience, experiential learning for sophomores, a major plus 16 courses outside of the major, and the Mentored Academic Pathway (MAP) program. There are also optional elements, including the Liberal Education and Professional Success (LEAPS) program and honors and scholars programs .

These programs are intended to provide targeted interdisciplinary pathways of courses, experiential opportunities that map to careers, and professional mentors who supplement academic advisors. The new curriculum is also designed to adapt over time. Currently, staff and faculty are examining measures of equity — observing who is taking advantage of the new opportunities and who is not — to ensure the new programs are easily accessible and available to all students.

Credential Models

Beyond challenges in advising and curriculum, colleges are also considering how the credentials they provide may be falling short of labor market needs. For example, the current model of majors and diplomas (i.e., the bachelor’s degree for a typical four-year liberal arts college) can be limiting in that it doesn’t necessarily show all the experiential learning and work-relevant skills that a student has acquired.

There is a need to recognize learning that may be happening outside of a specific major or set of courses. With the traditional model, a liberal arts institution can become more of a “sorting” mechanism — sorting students into colleges, majors, and degree programs — rather than a “service” mechanism that provides students with the experiences and skills they need to be career-ready and employable.

“The current model of majors and degrees is insufficient to capture the experiential learning and work-relevant skills students acquire.”

Lehigh University has started a new credentialing initiative to acknowledge student learning that is residential and experiential — and beyond typical classroom learning. Blockchain technology was selected to provide students with more autonomy over their co-curricular and experiential learning credentials. (Traditional transcripts, in contrast, are owned and controlled by institutions.)

Students who participate in Lehigh’s Mountaintop Summer Experience or Iacocca International Internships, or who participate in the school’s Division I athletics, receive a blockchain-anchored credential highlighting the proficiency they gained outside of the classroom. Proficiencies typically gained from these experiences are in areas such as critical thinking and problem solving, global intercultural fluency, and teamwork collaboration. Students in the Athletics program even receive different types of certificates based on their levels of participation.

In addition to helping students to more clearly articulate their skills to potential employers, the certificate program also allows Lehigh to re-engage with students and alumni post-graduation and remain anchored to them throughout their careers. Students can work with the university to build and maintain a digital wallet that documents their skills and experiences for a lifetime. This, in effect, shifts the model of the university from a finite process to more of an ongoing platform.

Collaborations

Recredentialing initiatives — and all efforts to prepare students for the workforce — also require strong relationships with outside institutions, including nearby community colleges as well as employers and alumni. These different players offer diverse perspectives and capabilities; in collaboration, they can provide a diverse range of help to prepare students for their careers.

When designing its new curriculum, the team at Davidson College looked specifically at how the institution’s strengths align with the needs of employers. In speaking directly with employers, they found that employers sought workers with specialized and human skills, and also felt they would benefit from more career exploration pathways, leadership development opportunities, and fast upskilling and reskilling programs.

The employer demands and learner demands highlighted the value of a short-form (2–6 month) certificate program emphasizing “soft skills” within a specific industry context. Davidson, located near Charlotte, NC, is also becoming increasingly intentional about ways it can leverage educational programs and resources to contribute towards solutions for the nearby city’s economic inequity challenges.

“Efforts to prepare students for the workforce require strong relationships among institutions, including liberal arts schools, local community colleges, employers, and alumni.”

At Trinity College in Hartford, CT, a small group of undergraduate students have an opportunity to work with employees at InfoSys, a global technology company and a major local employer, in an 8- to 10-week project-based experience. This partnership is designed to provide Trinity students and alumni with opportunities to build technological skills and other career-relevant skills. Trinity alumni are among the new Infosys employees who have gone through the Business Analysis for Digital Transformation Program, which is part of the Trinity-Infosys Applied Learning Initiative . The program takes place on Trinity’s campus and many of the training courses are taught by Trinity faculty and staff.

Pima Community College (located in Tucson, Arizona), while not a traditional liberal arts college, highlights value of human skills to career readiness — including for middle-skill career pathways. Pima has created two important pilot programs, working in close collaboration with partners who provide funding toward helping students to discover more about what human skills are and how to apply them. The Community College Growth Engine Fund supports “micropathways” at the school, including advanced manufacturing, automotive tech, IT/cybersecurity, construction (HVAC, electrical, plumbing, carpentry), and public safety. Each micro-pathways incorporates “21st-century skills” related to employability, human skills, or professional skills that are relevant to those specific jobs.

In addition, the Bank of America Jobs Initiative supports students of color in gaining work-essential skills in a general/liberal arts education pilot program. Pima also works with Caterpillar and the University of Arizona to reskill and upskill engineers. The college is now considering how it might create a short-term open-enrollment online course to provide micro-credentials.

Liberal arts leaders also emphasized the importance of maintaining relationships with alumni as a means of connecting students to career opportunities. At Wellesley College, students have mentored opportunities to do “real-world” work with alumni in a “bite-sized” two-week experience. During a four-week period, each student completes two internships.

Looking to the Future

Liberal arts institutions are a vibrant and essential element of the US educational ecosystem. However, many face an existential threat from an increasing focus on cost-effectiveness of post-secondary education. To many prospective students, parents, and employers, liberal arts colleges can be seen as poor investments to prepare for an economically viable career trajectory. Yet other people see liberal arts graduates advancing more rapidly than other graduates, even if they start lower in their initial jobs. The challenge for liberal arts educators is to how to bridge that gap in terms of both student skills and broader societal perceptions.

Our series of rich discussions among liberal arts leaders at eleven institutions point to a clear direction forward. Liberal arts colleges need to help their students become more ready for their first jobs, without sacrificing the rich educational experience that makes them well prepared for mid-career growth. They need to build on the richness of their curriculum while adding new experiences, and new signaling mechanisms, of greater workforce relevance.

This transformation is a substantial undertaking — and may, in some cases, require resources not available to each institution. We can, however, start to form a research agenda that aims to better understand the lessons learned so far, and looks in-depth at areas that still need to be explored.

In particular, our discussions surfaced the following imperatives for liberal arts institutions:

1. Change the mindset of the institutions. Liberal arts leaders have a formidable challenge to help their institutions see workforce readiness to be just as important as knowledge itself. There is a history in these institutions (and others) for faculty to reject the need for career readiness. “Our goal is not to train you for a job. It’s to teach you how to think.” Liberal arts institutions need to transform this contrast into a complementary — creating great thinkers who are ready for careers immediately upon graduation.

2. Highlight workforce relevance of skills imparted by existing curriculum. Employers are increasingly demanding the human skills that liberal arts institutions teach exceedingly well. Critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, comfort with ambiguity, and systems thinking are core components of a liberal arts education. But these can be very difficult to document in a resume or demonstrate in an interview. Colleges should do much more to help students identify and describe the skills they have gained, and to help employers see the value of these skills.

3. Improve the ability to teach relevant technical skills. Many great liberal arts institutions already have strong programs in lab sciences, economics or computer science. Yet these sometimes yield a BA degree instead of a BS. These colleges can build on their strengths in pure science to make the students more attractive to employers who readily hire engineering students. Examples include extending economics or computer science courses with deeper training in data science or software engineering.

4. Help students think about workforce relevance from the beginning. Liberal arts students are creative explorers. They may not be thinking about careers when they start school, and the richness of liberal arts education can lead them in many different directions. However, by senior year, when they need to think about their next steps, they may have already missed important opportunities to gain workforce relevant experiences. When high percentages of liberal arts college graduates move directly to graduate school, should school leaders consider this a signal of success or failure? The school leaders in our roundtable are all working to help students think about their career trajectories as they start their educational journeys, not just as they prepare to finish.

5. Embed experiential learning opportunities into the curriculum. Students’ work experience should not be limited to the few lucky individuals who land great summer jobs. Educators should work to build experiential opportunities directly into the curriculum. Just as many liberal arts programs include a semester abroad, educators should consider how to bring the world into the classroom through labs, collaborative projects, guest speakers, or field studies. Then they should take a step further, to ensure that every student gets a taste of real-world work through internships or apprenticeships built directly into the four-year educational journey.

6. Establish collaborative arrangements between institutions. The walls of the ivory tower are rapidly falling, revealing the ecosystems within which colleges and their stakeholders operate. Institutions such as Davidson and Georgetown increasingly work with employers, government agencies, non-profits, and other educational institutions to address societal challenges at the local or global level. Tackling these challenges can provide fruitful opportunities for students to “get their hands dirty” and produce tangible results that they can talk about, while also introducing those students to people who are well-positioned to hire them or recommend them for jobs.

Next steps for the conversations

The imperatives discussed above, though essential, but will be difficult to accomplish. Each liberal arts institution will need to chart its own course toward these goals, based on its own unique capabilities and context. However, we believe that, by continuing to build on the rich and fruitful discussion among our roundtable members, we can together find solutions.

In particular, we have identified a set of specific questions that, if answered, can help every institution on its journey to being more clearly workforce-relevant:

1. How might we develop new ways of measuring effectiveness of advising? Advising is obviously a core piece in increasing the career-readiness of students. How can we make sure the new methods are working, and that students are benefiting? And how can we can ensure they are working for faculty and career staff — effectively leveraging the strengths of each?

2. How can we build programs that are available to, and can be tailored to, learners with different needs? Learners with different needs, abilities, preparedness, and capacity (including diverse socioeconomic status, academic background, or career aspiration, as well as single parents and working learners) will respond differently to different types of programs. How can we ensure that programs can be accessible to learners with different needs and goals? Colleges designing a new curriculum noted that their programs will likely need to evolve over time. How can we make sure programs are created with the flexibility to adapt? What mechanisms do institutions have in place to ensure they remain in sync with the changing goals and challenges of their students?

3. How can we build on existing practices to codify and certify the skills learners develop in both academic and experiential learning settings? The long-standing model of using an undergraduate diploma to certify the knowledge and experience gained from a liberal arts institution has become outdated. It is no longer useful in a practical sense. How can institutions empower students to understand the human and technical skills they are gaining from their experiences both inside and outside the classroom — and communicate those effectively to potential employers? For experiential learning, in particular, which skills are the most critical for students to demonstrate?

4. What kinds of institutional collaborations are best-suited to bridge the career relevance gap? How can institutions form connections with industry that will best serve their students? And how can they also ensure they form connections that might serve their larger community, such as with community colleges, local school systems, or non-profits? There is still a lot of potential for liberal arts institutions to engage with organizations in nearby cities and towns, benefiting students, industry, and the local community.

5. How can we engage with alumni to create career-readiness opportunities for current students? This is an important, and perhaps especially challenging, question since there can often be a disconnect between alumni and current students. While alumni have much to offer to students, such as advice, internships or job leads, colleges may inadvertently make it difficult to link the two groups, leading alumni to become disengaged. The institutions involved in our roundtable did not provide many examples of alumni engagement toward career-readiness programs and initiatives. Lehigh University’s efforts to reframe the traditional four-year program into a life-long educational platform may be a useful model for a process that engages engaging students with employers, and graduates with current students, at broad scale. How might colleges add more value for alumni in continuing relationships with them?

This discussion series is intended to be just the beginning, inspiring more discussions with other contributors who have a stake in the future of liberal arts education. The recommendations, questions, and examples in this report outline what could be the beginning of a vital program of research that includes collaborations, workshops, and experiments in our roundtable and beyond.

Acknowledgements

This white paper synthesizes discussions from a set of meetings among leaders at 11 institutions. We thank these leaders for their willingness to share their practices and challenges. By engaging thoughtfully in the discussions, they helped their fellow roundtable members to understand and articulate a new vision for the future. And, by generously allowing the authors to participate, they are helping to share their experiences with a wide range of educational institutions and leaders.

Workforce Relevance of Liberal Arts Education Roundtable Series Participating Institutions *

Babson College — Ian Lapp (Dean of Undergrad Education), Donna Sosnowski (Director, Career Development)
Davidson College — Kristen Eshelman (Director of Innovation Initiatives)
Dean College — Brian Hastings (Dean, School of Liberal Arts)
Lehigh University — Cameron McCoy (VP & Vice Provost Strategic Initiatives)
MIT Sloan School of Management — Susan Brennan (Assistant Dean, Career Development Office)
Pima Community College — Lee Lambert (Chancellor), Ian Roark (VP Workforce Development and Strategic Partnerships)
Quinnipiac University — Rick Delvecchio (Director of Career Development, College of Arts & Sciences)
Simmons University — Russell Pinizotti (Interim Provost)
Trinity College — Joe Catrino (Director, Career Development)
Wellesley College — Jennifer Pollard (Director, Operations and Analytics)
Wheaton College (MA) — Steven Vivieros (Dean of Advising and Academic Success), Lisa Gavigan (Director, Career Services), Karen McCormack (Assoc. Provost for Academic Administration and Faculty Affairs)

*We have listed participants in the positions they held during the roundtable series. Several have moved to other roles or institutions since that time.

Dr. M. S. Vijay Kumar is Executive Director of J-WEL and Associate Dean for Open Learning at MIT. Vijay has been providing leadership for technology-enabled educational innovation at MIT for the past 22 years, previously as MIT’s Senior Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education, Assistant Provost, and Director of Academic Computing.

Ramji Raghavan is the Founder & CEO of Pragya Systems. Pragya’s mission is to drive educational relevance by helping higher-ed students align their learning and experiences to careers. Its unique AI powered architecture taps into institutional silos and off-campus labor market intelligence sources to unlock holistic advising.

Dr. George Westerman is Principal Research Scientist for Workforce Learning in the MIT Jameel World Education Laboratory, and a Senior Lecturer in the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research examines the transformative impact of digital innovation on companies and workers. He and his team recently launched the Global Opportunity Initiative, which is building a community of organizations that create and use innovative methods to help individuals to take charge of their career development. For more information about this white paper, contact: George Westerman, [email protected]

Susan Young is Director of Strategic Initiatives of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. She previously served as Assistant Director of Workforce Learning at J-WEL, where she managed member engagement and the Workforce Learning research grant program, and supported program development and research activities.

Fostering Global Educational Transformation J-WEL is an initiative of MIT and Community Jameel, the social enterprise organization founded by MIT alumnus Mohammed Jameel ’78. Community Jameel was established in 2003 to continue the Jameel family’s tradition of supporting the community, a tradition started in the 1940s by the late Abdul Latif Jameel, founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel business, who throughout his life helped tens of thousands of disadvantaged people in the fields of healthcare, education, and improving livelihoods. Today, Community Jameel is dedicated to supporting social and economic sustainability across the Middle East and beyond through a range of initiatives including J-WEL, as well as three other labs at MIT: the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the Abdul Latif Jameel Water & Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), and the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (J-Clinic).

Pragya Systems ’ mission is to help students and working learners align their learning choices to careers and jobs. Pragya’s AI powered solution links learning pathways to labor market intelligence, skills and career outcomes to drive higher-ed enrollment, retention and workforce skilling. Pragya has partnered with several leading higher ed institutions to showcase ROI of their programs, provide holistic advising and deliver competency-based education. It is led by industry veterans and backed by top EdTech investors and advisors. Pragya is a winner of an NSF SBIR grant, and a global semifinalist of the XPRIZE Rapid Re-skilling initiative

The Workforce Relevance of Liberal Arts Education was originally published in MIT Open Learning on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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In short, a liberal arts degree is a degree in thinking. what does this mean it means that a liberal arts education, done right and undertaken with enthusiasm, curiosity, and passion, makes you smarter., what is a liberal arts education and why is it more important than ever in the age of chatgpt.

With all the attention that Generative AI is getting these days, and the promise that ChatGPT can even write our essays for us, you might be wondering, "Why do I need to get an education at all, never mind the classic liberal arts degree like the one offered at Dartmouth?" Cecilia Gaposchkin, the Charles A. and Elfriede A. Collis Professor in History at Dartmouth, explains in her piece for 3D Magazine , a magazine that tells the stories of Dartmouth in all its dimensions.

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12 Benefits of a Liberal Arts Education

A liberal arts education prepares students to examine ideas from multiple points of view, solve problems, adapt, and collaborate.

January 17, 2020

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Liberal Arts. The term itself conjures up a wide range of definitions - ask 20 people what it means and you’re likely to get 20 different responses.

For some, the term “liberal” is a roadblock they can’t get past. Which is unfortunate, because although it includes the word, not all liberal arts students are liberal in their political views. Some are. Others are ultra-conservative. The rest fall somewhere in between. A liberal arts education is not rooted in politics, but rather the desire to broaden the mind.

Of course, there are others who zero in on the term “arts” and assume that a liberal arts education excludes STEM and business fields. Which couldn’t be further from the truth. Naturally fine arts, including music and theatre, play a major role in a liberal arts education. But so do science, math and computer sciences and many others. In fact, plenty of tech industry leaders have been quoted touting the benefits of a liberal arts education. Turns out developers that can code AND have an eye for visual details – or engineers that can analyze data from multiple points of view – are much better positioned to truly innovate and create real change in their industry.

Benefits of a Liberal Arts Education

A liberal arts education prepares students to examine ideas from multiple points of view, solve problems, adapt, and collaborate. By combining multiple disciplines of study, liberal arts colleges expose students to a wide range of subjects, encouraging them to think outside a narrow focus and contribute to original solutions – all skills that are highly valued by top employers.

To help outline some of the pros of attending a liberal arts school, here is a list of 12 benefits of a liberal arts education:

1). Interdisciplinary approach to learning – A liberal arts education intentionally integrates different areas of study, exposing students to a wide range of subjects. Business majors will have classes in the arts, while pre-med majors may get a taste of sociology. This broad education prepares students to succeed in whatever career they choose. People that can view things from multiple perspectives, no matter their field, provide greater value to employers.

2). Relatively small size – The majority of liberal arts colleges are small, at least in in comparison to major public universities. In addition to creating a more intimate, “family” feel of camaraderie on campus, the smaller size creates multiple opportunities for personalized, individual learning experiences.

3). Get to know faculty – The professors not only get to know their students’ names, but their strengths, challenges and passions. They provide mentorship in a way faculty at larger institutions can’t always offer due to the sheer volume of students.

4). Interactive classes – The classes at liberal arts colleges provide a huge benefit. Rather than massive lecture halls with 200+ half-dozing students, students are more likely to find themselves in a small, interactive environment. A low student-faculty ratio and small class size allows for deeper connections and true learning. Student engagement is expected and questions are encouraged.

5). Exposure to cool things – Students are constantly exposed to interesting ideas, creative concepts and new experiences. Whether it’s studying abroad, community engaged learning or conducting peer-reviewed research with a professor (an experience often reserved for graduate work at other schools), students continuously have the opportunity to explore, take risks and try new things.

6). Teaches critical & innovative thinking skills – Through intentional experience and exposure, liberal arts colleges provide students with the all-important problem-solving and critical thinking skills. They focus on how to think, not what to think. Instead of memorizing facts and then forgetting the information at the end of the semester, students learn to examine, think and connect ideas. These valuable skills, practiced and reiterated throughout the entire college experience, are the skills necessary to innovate and create meaningful change in the world.

7). Strong alumni – Liberal arts colleges tend to have very active and involved alumni. While on campus students build lifelong friendships, and they continue to remain involved as mentors, donors and school supporters throughout their careers and life.

8). Financial Aid Opportunities – Liberal arts colleges often have generous financial aid options available for students.

9). Post-Graduation Jobs - Liberal arts colleges have some of the very best job placement rates, and for good reason. Graduates leave armed with the skills that employers value most – critical thinking, communication and the ability to view ideas from multiple perspectives. Best of all, they actively contribute to developing real solutions to real problems.

10). Graduate Program Acceptance - The idea that liberal arts are too, well, “arty” to be taken seriously is long gone. Today liberal arts have higher than average numbers of graduates being accepted into top graduate schools including medical school, law school, vet school and engineering programs. Why? Because the best schools know that liberal arts students are prepared to think, create, connect and come up with original solutions.

11). Prepares for Jobs Yet to be Created - Perhaps this should have been first on the list, because it’s arguably the most important. Not only do liberal arts colleges prepare students for their first job out of college, but they prepare them for future jobs that aren’t even jobs yet! It’s eye-opening to realize that according to the U.S. Department of Labor, 65% of current students will eventually be employed in jobs that have yet to be created , and 40% of current jobs will soon be a thing of the past. In twenty-five years, many of today’s college students will be in their mid-40s, working in jobs or fields that don’t yet exist. What is going to help them succeed in an ever-changing world? The ability to think, create, collaborate and adapt. These are classic liberal arts skills.

12). Social Responsibility – With an emphasis on civic responsibility and opportunities for community engagement, liberal arts students spend more volunteer hours than those at public universities. They open their eyes to the world around them, and how certain actions affect others. Whether it’s a service trip abroad during spring break or a class project working with a local non-profit, liberal arts students are engaged and committed to making the world a better place.

If you’re considering attending a liberal arts college, it pays to do your research and truly think about the relevant skills for the future. Not just your first job out of college, but the one you’ll have 20 years from now. Ask employers what they look for in employees, or what the most valuable skills are. The list often includes transferable skills such as the ability to collaborate, view things from multiple perspectives, adapt to changing demands and analyze and interpret data.

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What Is A Liberal Arts Education?

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By Cecilia Gaposchkin, the Charles A. and Elfriede A. Collis Professor in History at Dartmouth

What use is a liberal arts education in the age of chatgpt it's a good question. despite all the promises that proponents of ai are currently making, it is precisely in this environment that a liberal arts education is more critical than ever. to understand why, we need to understand what exactly a liberal arts education is..

Let us begin with what liberal education is not . First and foremost, it is not oriented to political parties, agendas, or philosophies. The phrase predates the creation of the two basic political parties by about 2,000 years. The "liberal arts" ( artes liberales ) go back to the ancient world, well before even the existence of universities, which emerged in Europe around 1200. The liberal arts were the skills ( artes ) taught to free men ( liberales )—that is, non-laborers or slaves. They were what trained free men (and, yes, they were only for men) to be able to think independently, and thus be competent to participate in governance and society.

What else? A liberal arts education is not a technical training in a particular subject matter that leads to a particular job and career trajectory. It is not a nursing degree. Or an accounting degree. Or a degree in computer systems administration. This does not mean that a liberal arts education will not prepare you for a career. It just doesn't prepare you for a single career. Indeed, what it does is prepare you for any multitude of careers. It is precisely because holders of liberal arts degrees are not pigeon-holed into a single vocation and thus a single career path that they have the enviable ability to make and take new professional opportunities.

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A liberal arts education should also not be confused with a degree in one of the humanities. Ars ( ars artis , for those of you who have had Latin) means "knowledge," "science," "skill," and "craft." It is a false friend (that is, a word that does not mean the same thing as a similar sounding word in a different language) that has not served the STEM fields well. Physics is an ars. Engineering is an ars. Robotics is an ars. So too are art history, sociology, and economics. A liberal arts education encompasses all academic disciplines, including the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences (everything from engineering, to chemistry, to computer science). In fact, a liberal arts education is defined precisely by its multitude of disciplines, which invites multiple ways of thinking about the world, about knowledge, and about "truth."

This is one of the reasons that liberal arts institutions like Dartmouth value diversity so much, because a diversity of knowledge, and a diversity of people who bring in different types of knowledge, is one of the foundational building blocks of this philosophy of education.

So what, then, are the liberal arts? And what is a liberal arts degree?

In short, a liberal arts degree is a degree in thinking. What does this mean? It means that a liberal arts education, done right and undertaken with enthusiasm, curiosity, and passion, makes you smarter. That is, it hones your natural skills of discernment and intellect to productive thought and the creative application of knowledge.

It exposes you to different types of thought (often through distribution and general education requirements—there's that diversity principle again) so that you can at once understand the power and the restrictions of different ways of thinking about the world (that is, different disciplines).

It teaches you how to use your thinking, and the skills acquired in honing your thinking (reading, writing, numeracy, analysis, synthesis, the persuasive expression of ideas, and the creative application of knowledge), in novel and creative ways, to solve problems and imagine new possibilities. That is, it teaches you how to be nimble and creative.

A liberal arts education teaches you to distinguish between claims and evidence, and between fact and opinion, and then to use facts and evidence to pursue informed agendas. These skills are honed first in the context of an area of major study, but they are also transferable skills, to be used in any—or many—context(s).

This is why, when employers hire students from liberal arts colleges, they care less about the student's major than about the student's ability to talk about their major intelligently. That is, employers hire our students not for what they know, but for how they think. Likewise, medical schools are eager to accept students who have studied the humanities, since these applicants bring a set of interpretive abilities with them that is vital in the practice of medicine; and it is also why law schools want students from the gamut of the disciplines, because the law touches on all areas of the human endeavor.

This approach to higher education has served us well. The liberal arts scheme has been the driver of knowledge production and intellectual inquiry since the Middle Ages. Indeed, it was the Middle Ages that invented both the institution of the university and our notion of critical thinking. Peter Abelard (d. 1142) is perhaps the most profound intellectual of the 12th century and a central figure in the development of formal learning that became university education. He rejected the intellectual method of the previous centuries that rested on the loyal acceptance of past authorities and taught a new generation of students to discover new knowledge by applying human reason to intellectual problems. Abelard explained simply that, "By doubting we examine, and by examining we come to the truth." Many historians recognize this moment in the 12th century to mark the beginning of the European "take off" and the seeds of modernity.

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It is a history we should pay attention to, at a moment when ChatGPT and Generative AI invite us to rely on large language models and algorithms (even if massive) that depend on existing knowledge, texts, and formulas. Useful, to be sure, in telling us what we already know, but what Abelard showed was that relying on past authorities prevented the discovery of new ideas, and that it was only through the critical application of human reason by trained minds to vexing or unsolved questions that new discoveries were made, and that knowledge as a whole moved forward.

In this sense, ChatGPT is just a souped-up version of eleventh-century scholarship, repackaging material from the body of previous writing (and here, not necessarily even the good writing) to reformulate existing ideas.

The point of a liberal arts education is to train the brain to look for new ideas, new ways of thinking about problems, new solutions. And to do so using knowledge framed with ethical values rooted in core principles of common humanity. For Abelard and his contemporaries, it was understood that one had to master the basic grammar of thought before tackling the more difficult and more important work of theology and philosophy. To that end, the standard university curriculum was rooted in the seven liberal arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). One had to learn to think critically, rationally, logically, and creatively before one could undertake more ambitious intellectual work. The seven liberal arts—the precursor of our own conception of "the liberal arts education"—were the building blocks of the competent mind.

The same premise underlies our own system of liberal education. The standard liberal arts curriculum is designed to ensure that students, upon completing their course of study, will have mastered the basic grammars of critical thought in order to then tackle, with creativity, reason, and inspiration, the more specialized tasks of professional life. This is why, looking back, careers often have so little relationship to majors. Amy Coney Barrett majored in English literature. Anthony Fauci majored in classics. Nikki Haley studied accounting and finance. Michael Bloomberg studied electrical engineering. Kirsten Gillibrand, a member of the Dartmouth Class of 1988, majored in Asian studies. It is also why so many career successes appear to have had such varied career paths.

What then, in this context, is the function of the required major if not to learn a specific amount of disciplinarily-defined content? It is not— not! —to train in a field that is based on information learned in that major. It is to practice thinking, researching, interpreting, writing, learning, and synthesizing with increasingly complex arenas of knowledge. It is to confront ambiguity and be able to reason toward the best solution. It is to come to a position on a question and argue for it convincingly to others. These, not discipline-specific information, are the skills (artes) that employers seek to capitalize on when hiring our graduates.

The major is thus, in a sense, the "thought laboratory," the brain's sandbox. Working within a defined discipline, with large and challenging data sets (whether in chemical data, or historical data, or philological data), the liberal arts student is prompted to manage, assess, and apply increasingly sophisticated ideas and information. Managing and interpreting complex concepts works the brain, like any muscle, to become stronger and more nimble—that is, smarter.

This is also why, if you want to get the most out of your undergraduate experience, you are probably better off writing a senior thesis in a discipline rather than double majoring in two closely related disciplines. This is what will push your brain farther—make you smarter—and this is the best investment you can make. Because, in final analysis, a liberal arts education has, over the past millennium, proven to be the best way to develop the capacity to think in sophisticated, multivalent (there's the diversity principle again), complex, and reasoned ways. And this is the thing that will permit you to do what ChatGPT, which constructs ideas from existing knowledge, will never be able to do: to imagine and create new vistas for the future.

Cecilia Gaposchkin, the Charles A. and Elfriede A. Collis Professor in History at Dartmouth, studies late medieval cultural history, and has published on the crusades, on the kings of medieval France, and on liturgy. She also served as Assistant Dean of Faculty for Pre-Major advising between 2004 and 2020.

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What Is a Liberal Arts College?

Liberal arts colleges differ from larger public universities and private institutions in a number of ways.

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A liberal arts college is a four-year undergraduate institution that takes a broader approach to education by focusing on the arts, sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Instead of preparing students for a specific career, such as business or computer science, a liberal arts curriculum encourages them to develop an appreciation for many subjects and practice their critical thinking skills. As such, students can pursue many careers after graduating.

In this article, we’ll explore more about liberal arts colleges, the types of subjects you can expect to study, and what you can do with a liberal arts degree.

Liberal arts colleges

Liberal arts colleges base their curriculum on some of the earliest education principles, which are meant to produce students capable of thinking critically about the world around them. First used in the fourteenth century, "liberales artes" referred to the type of education available for free individuals at the time. It primarily involved subjects that stimulated the mind, like arithmetic, geometry, grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

These days, liberal arts degrees are designed to prepare students to solve problems, think critically, communicate well, and collaborate with others. Liberal arts colleges differ from larger public universities and private institutions. Some common characteristics include:

Small size: Most liberal arts colleges have less than 5,000 students in attendance at any given time.

Classroom interaction: Thanks to the reduced student population, classes tend to be smaller in order to foster open discussion and spirited student-teacher interaction.

Focus on undergraduates: Larger universities offer undergraduate and graduate degrees, but liberal arts colleges focus solely on undergraduate degrees.

On-campus community: There are fewer part-time students and students who commute at liberal arts colleges. Instead, students tend to be full-time and live on campus.

Emphasis on teaching: Unlike other institutions, where professors are expected to focus on research and may teach a limited number of classes each semester, professors at liberal arts colleges focus on teaching first and research second.

What is a liberal arts degree?

When you attend a four-year college or university to obtain your Bachelor of Arts (BA) or Bachelor of Science (BS) degree , you will spend at least the first two years working through general education requirements that are steeped in the liberal arts tradition. At first, you will take a wide variety of classes unrelated to your major so that you develop your critical faculties. From there, you will likely declare a major and begin working through that specific coursework.

When you attend a liberal arts college, there’s a greater emphasis on the connections between the different subjects you study. You will still declare a major, but even as you move into that coursework, you will continue focusing on your education in a way that ideally fosters your intellectual curiosity. You will likely graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Learn more: How to Get a Bachelor’s Degree

Popular liberal arts majors

As with any bachelor’s degree program, you will choose a major for your liberal arts degree, but you will also be exposed to an array of other subjects—like the creative arts, history, literature, math, philosophy, psychology, science, and sociology—so that you develop a more well-rounded education.

Several popular liberal arts degrees include a focus on:

American studies

Creative writing

What can I do with a liberal arts degree?

With a liberal arts degree, you can develop a number of valuable workplace skills , like adaptability, communication, organization, time management, problem-solving, and teamwork. Unlike a major which prepares you to enter a specific career track (think marketing or data science), you can explore many options with your liberal arts degree, using the broader skills you’ve developed to perform different types of work.

Here are just a few types of work you can explore with a liberal arts degree.

Public service

A small campus with a sense of community encourages liberal arts students to connect with others. It's not surprising, then, that many liberal arts graduates opt for careers in public service. Areas of public service include social services, diplomacy, politics, and public policy.

With excellent problem-solving skills and an ability to think critically, liberal arts graduates often seek jobs in business. Some potential career fields include account management, customer relations, marketing, and sales.

A liberal arts degree is meant to foster a love of knowledge and learning, which is why some liberal arts graduates enjoy sharing that passion with others.

With skills in reading, writing, research, and communication, liberal arts graduates make good copywriters, content writers, editors, and journalists.

Entry-level jobs for liberal arts majors

To get a better feel for what you can do with a liberal arts major, here are a few entry-level jobs and the liberal arts majors that may help you land them.

Business associate: economics, psychology, sociology

Events planner: communications, psychology, sociology

Museum technician: art history, classics, history, languages

HR coordinator: psychology, sociology, communications

Political reporter: American studies, history, political science

Marketing specialist: communications, creative writing, psychology

Public relations specialist: communications, sociology

Should I attend a liberal arts college?

Your decision to attend a liberal arts college will likely depend on what kind of education you're seeking and what kind of career you hope to have.

Reasons why a liberal arts college might be best for you

Time to explore: A liberal arts college makes a great choice if you have a general idea of what you want to study but haven't decided yet. Because this type of education exposes you to a broad base of subjects, you might gain a better understanding of potential career paths.

Foster connections: This type of college also works well if you enjoy getting to know your fellow classmates and professors. On-campus living and small class size encourage a tight-knit college community.

Develop a wide array of skills: A liberal arts college isn’t really designed for students who want to pursue one specific outcome after graduation. Thanks to the emphasis on an interdisciplinary focus and general knowledge, you can use your well-rounded options to explore a number of paths.

Reasons why another higher ed setting might be best for you

Technical fields: A liberal arts college may not be the best option if you're set on a technical field. You might not learn specific skills with this type of curriculum nor gain any hands-on experience like you might in a vocational school or professional program.

Big lecture classes: If you enjoy the feeling of anonymity that large classes can produce, you may be better off going to a four-year public university or a private university. During your first two years, especially, many of your general ed classes may involve larger class settings.

Flexible scheduling or self-paced options: Because of the small class size and emphasis on in-person learning, you may find less flexibility or self-paced options when it comes to taking classes than you might from an online degree program.

Fraternities and sororities: If you're interested in joining a fraternity or sorority, you may not find them at many liberal arts colleges, though there are many other student groups available to join.

Examples of liberal arts colleges

If you're interested in a liberal arts college, you can find them spread across the US. Here are a few examples of some of the top liberal arts colleges in the country:

Amherst College (Amherst, Massachusetts)

Carleton College (Northfield, Minnesota)

Dartmouth College (Hanover, New Hampshire)

Middlebury College (Middlebury, Vermont)

Morehouse College (Atlanta, Georgia)

Pomona College (Claremont, California)

Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, Pennsylvania)

United States Naval Academy (Annapolis, Maryland)

Want to learn more about a liberal arts education? You can take free classes from Morehouse College and Dartmouth College on Coursera. Explore topics like Activism in Sports Culture and Energy Justice .

How to apply to a liberal arts college

The steps involved in applying to a liberal arts college are similar to those involved in applying to most four-year schools. You will likely need to:

Take a college entrance exam like the ACT or SAT .

Complete your college application.

Write your required personal statement .

Gather the necessary letters of recommendation .

Request and submit your high school transcripts.

Attach your payment to application packages.

Submit all of your materials before the deadline (found on each college’s website).

Learn more: Step-by-Step Guide to Applying for College

What to know before applying to a liberal arts college

Liberal arts colleges often take a second look at well-rounded applicants. To diversify your interests in high school, participate in a sport or join a club. Explore the arts by taking a class in painting, sculpture, drama, or dance, or join the yearbook or the school paper. Lastly, performing volunteer work can send a strong signal to admissions committees. Get involved with your community by volunteering at a local animal shelter, rest home, or food bank.

The selection committees at liberal arts colleges also value academic performance, so it’s better to keep your grades high throughout high school. Before you begin studying for your college entrance exam , research which test is best suited to you and give yourself plenty of time to prepare.

To explore more about a liberal arts education, get a feel for what some of your classes might be like. Check out various arts and humanities courses offered on Coursera by world-class colleges and universities. Many are free to enroll in, and cover a wide variety of subject matter so you can learn more about your interests—or discover new ones.

What Is a Humanities Major (What Can You Do with This Degree)?

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On the "core questions" for a liberal arts education

What Is Liberal Arts? Definition and Examples

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B.S., Political Science, Boise State University

Liberal arts is a field of study based on rational thinking, and it includes the areas of humanities, social and physical sciences, and mathematics. A liberal arts education emphasizes the development of critical thinking and analytical skills, the ability to solve complex problems, and an understanding of ethics and morality, as well as a desire to continue to learn.

Liberal arts are increasingly important in the diversified job market, with employers choosing to hire liberal arts majors because of their ability to handle complex situations and solve problems with ease.

Key Takeaways: Liberal Arts Definition

A liberal arts education emphasizes rational thought and aims to develop robust critical thinking and analytical skills, problem solving abilities, and a strong moral compass.
Fields of study include humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, and mathematics.
The key element in defining liberal arts is the intent to combine practical, concrete information, like data and statistics, with theoretical knowledge, like ethics and philosophy.
Mathematics and science can also be considered liberal arts. The element that determines a liberal arts education is not necessarily the major, but rather the institution. Liberal arts colleges provide students with education in both intellectual and practical skills.

Liberal Arts Definition

Liberal arts are commonly misunderstood as “soft” subjects that lack supporting numbers or data. While the liberal arts definition does include humanities and soft sciences, it also encompasses physical sciences and mathematics. The key element in defining liberal arts is the intent to combine practical, concrete information, like data and statistics, with theoretical knowledge, like ethics and philosophy. This kind of learning produces well-rounded students with strong critical thinking and analytical skills, and the ability to adapt and work well in various fields of study.

Though the world’s greatest Greek and Roman thinkers—think Plato , Hippocrates , Aristotle—pioneered the liberal arts more than a millennium ago, contemporary universities include general education requirements that supplement subject-specific course because the purpose of the modern university is to provide a combination of practical and intellectual training.

Liberals arts can be found at a wide range of colleges and universities, though some institutions place a stronger emphasis on the discipline than others. Some institutions filter out the liberal arts completely, focusing instead on career-oriented skill acquisition. Below are the different types of institutions and how they relate to the liberal arts.

Public and Private Colleges feature a robust curriculum with a handful of general education requirements, including liberal arts and interdisciplinary subjects. For example, business majors may be required to complete courses on ethics, history, or language, which are intended to influence the way they understand their career-oriented courses.
For-Profit Colleges are privately owned institutions that facilitate career-specific training, usually in culinary arts, healthcare, and business. The focus is entirely on practical training, so liberal arts are not included in the curriculum.
Community Colleges offer two-year programs that lead to an associate's degree. They are frequently used as stepping stones toward a bachelor's degree, so students will complete their general education (and liberal arts) studies before going on to a larger university.
Vocational/Technical/Trade Colleges are institutions that give students career-specific training in one field, and they do not include liberals arts within the curriculum, similar to for-profit institutions.
Liberal Arts Colleges, as the name suggests, are institutions that focus heavily on providing a strong liberal arts education to all students in all fields. Usually, these are private, four-year colleges that tend to be more expensive than other institutions. Common courses include history, language, mathematics, science, and philosophy.

Liberal Arts Majors and Examples

There are several branches of liberal arts majors, including humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, and mathematics. While attending higher education, students can select majors that fall under any of these categories.

Humanities are academic subjects that focus on human culture. These majors include English , Creative Writing, Linguistics , language acquisition (Spanish, Greek, Mandarin), History, Literature and Composition, and Geography .
Social Sciences are focused specifically on human society and interpersonal relationships. They feature elements of hard science, including data and statistical analysis, and they use the scientific method to reach conclusions. Social science majors include Psychology, Sociology , Anthropology , Political Science , and Economics .
Physical Science and Mathematics can be included within the definition of liberal arts if the curriculum seeks to combine practical and philosophical knowledge. This combination can be found in general education requirements in many state schools as well as at liberal arts-focused colleges. Physical science and math majors include Astronomy, Biology , Chemistry , Geology, Physics , Geophysics, and Mathematics (broadly, usually encompassing algebra, geometry, calculus, and so on).
Liberal Arts Teaching Methods are often used in classroom settings to encourage group participation and discussion, regardless of whether or not the material is considered a liberal art. For example, the Socratic Method is a type of teaching in which students present and defend arguments and teachers talk very little, acting as arbiters of the conversation. The purpose of this method is to develop critical and analytical thinking skills across disciplines.

Best Liberal Arts Colleges

Liberal arts colleges tend to be small, private institutions with low teacher-to-student ratios, and especially in the United States, much higher price tags than other four-year colleges and universities. However, they rarely teach single-minded expertise on one subject and often feature robust general education requirements. This higher education model provides students with a well-rounded education and a strong moral compass. Successful liberal arts institutions should produce students well-trained in soft and hard sciences, mathematics, and humanities, making the price worthwhile.

According to data from Forbes , the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education, and US News and World Report , the following schools are consistently ranked as the best liberal arts colleges in the United States:

Williams College (Berkshires, Massachusetts): Williams College requires students to take three courses in three different fields of study: arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and mathematics. There are no required courses, but all students must demonstrate strong skills in writing, reasoning, and mathematics before earning a degree. Williams is one of the highest producers of both Fulbright and Rhodes Scholars.
Amherst College (Amherst, Massachusetts): Amherst College features an open course plan, which allows students to choose the courses they are most interested in. Amherst has no required core curriculum. Students can choose between 40 majors, or they can design their own major.
Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, Pennsylvania): Swarthmore is based on a Quaker tradition, emphasizing strong relationships between teachers, students, peers, and the environment. At 8:1, the student-to-teacher ratio is low, and Swarthmore is one of the top producers of Fulbright Scholars in the U.S. Swarthmore offers an engineering degree, unlike most liberal arts colleges.
Pomona College (Claremont, California): Just an hour away from Los Angeles, Claremont College offers 48 different majors and over 600 courses, with a low 8:1 student-to-teacher ratio. Claremont offers admission to all students regardless of their ability to pay tuition and offers complete financial aid to meet the demonstrated need of every admitted student.
Bowdoin College (Brunswick, Maine): Bowdoin College focuses on need-blind admissions, diversity, and social responsibility while fostering independent thought. More than half of Bowdoin students complete additional honors and summer coursework, and a majority of students produce robust independent research before graduating.
Wellesley College (Wellesley, Massachusetts): Widely considered to be the top women's college in the country, Wellesley College features a strong list of alumni, including former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Hillary Rodham Clinton . More than 70 percent of all students participate in internships during their studies and more than half study abroad.
Bates College (Lewiston, Maine): Bates College requires first-year freshman to take an orientation course together during the first semester to develop a strong foundation of scholarship and community. The low student-to-teacher ratio emphasizes this foundation, as does the strong sense of community outreach and annual volunteer efforts. In 2017, the college was ranked number one for Fulbright recipients.
Davidson College (Davidson, North Carolina): Located just north of Charlotte, Davidson College has produced 23 Rhodes Scholars and 86 Fulbright Scholars. More than 80 percent of the student body study or work abroad during their tenure and just under 25 percent of students also participate in athletics.
Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut): Wesleyan provides students with the option of open curriculum, where they determine the courses they are most interested in taking, as well as pre-planned majors with emphasis on interdisciplinary studies, in true liberal arts fashion. The university also offers need-blind admission and features a low 8:1 student-to-teacher ratio.
Smith College (Northhampton, Massachusetts): As an all women's college, Smith stands out by consistently ranking among the best liberal arts colleges in the U.S. It offers nearly 1.000 courses in 50 different fields of study and sends half of its student to study abroad annually. It is ranked every year as one of the highest producers of Fulbright Scholars.
Sanders, Matthew. Becoming a Learner: Realizing the Opportunity of Education . Institution for Communication & Leadership, 2012.
Tachikawa, Akira. “Development of Liberal Arts Education and Colleges: Historical and Global Perspectives.” Liberal Arts Education and Colleges in East Asia. Singapore: Springer, 2016. 13–25.
Zakaria, Fareed. In Defense of a Liberal Education . W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

Pericles Lewis

Yale university, liberal education and innovation, speech by pericles lewis, president, yale-nus college symposium on university as a source of innovation and economic development stanford center, peking university 4 october 2014.

Enge Wang, President, Peking University,

John Etchemendy, Provost, Stanford University,

Richard Saller, Dean, School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University,

Colleagues,

Liberal education is among the most honored but also the most contested creations of the modern university system, a mode of learning broadly and deeply which has inspired new programs and schools throughout Asia and beyond, even as it has become a site of debate in the United States. 21 st -century liberal education should draw on the traditional strengths of the liberal arts tradition, which I will describe today as a series of conversations. At the same time, I will recognize certain important criticisms of existing liberal education programs, which focus on the shaping of students’ characters through education. Finally, I will describe the founding of a new liberal education institution, Yale-NUS College, which is envisioned as a community of learning. I hope, then, to define what is living in the tradition of liberal arts education, what are its current failings, and what innovations can be introduced in order to re-envision this form of education for a complex, interconnected world.

I will speak broadly of liberal education, but I have in mind especially the form of education in the liberal arts and sciences practiced in the best colleges and universities in the United States, as contrasted with university systems that emphasize relatively early specialization, such as have been common in Asia at least since the Second World War.

While I myself attended a university with such a program, McGill University, where I took a three-year honors degree in English literature, my experience in graduate school at Stanford and as a faculty member at Yale University in the United States and more recently in Singapore at Yale-NUS College, has convinced me that a broader, four-year program spanning the breadth of the humanities and sciences promises a better foundation for future global citizens. In a broad sense, of course, my training at McGill was also a form of liberal education, and perhaps more important than the distinction between curricula with greater specialization or greater depth is the broad spirit of liberal learning which is present in many great colleges and universities and is certainly not the exclusive preserve of the American form of liberal education. So I am speaking today both about the specifics of a particular kind of curriculum and about the broader principles underlying liberal education in general. I should emphasize too that a liberal education includes science so I am not advocating for a liberal education at the expense of STEM education; rather, I think the two should be integrated.

There are at least five good reasons to pursue a liberal education, and to provide one for our students:

The most commonly cited reason, and a very important one, is to make students into better-informed citizens. By developing their critical reasoning skills, and by practicing the art of discussion and consensus in a classroom, they become better able to debate matters of public importance and to arrive at reasoned agreement, or reasoned disagreement, with their peers in the political sphere.

Another reason, equally valid and perhaps even more important to some parents and governments, is to create more innovative workers. Technical education is extremely important for the development of industrial society, but in the post-industrial world, employers value skills such as creativity, the ability to “think outside the box,” openness to multiple perspectives; and liberal education fosters these traits.

Certain forms of liberal education also prepare students well for life in a multi-cultural or cosmopolitan society by making them aware of a variety of cultures and the need to communicate effectively across cultures.

More fundamental than any of these, perhaps, is the ethical case for liberal education. Socrates said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Liberal education fosters habits of self-awareness and self-criticism and makes us aware of the importance of examining our own prejudices and assumptions.

Finally, and most intangibly, liberal education allows the individual a greater enjoyment of life; whether it is in appreciating a work of art, understanding an argument in philosophy or an equation in mathematics, or exploring the diversity of the natural world. To be broadly educated provides pleasure and depth to the experience of life, something that has been recognized both in China and the West for centuries. It is recorded in the Analects that Confucius said, “’The gentleman is not a [one-purpose] vessel.’” 君子不器 (Analects [Lunyu] 2.11). As the Song-dynasty Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi [Shee] explains in his commentary to the passage: “Vessels are things that each fulfill a particular function yet cannot be used interchangeably. A man of accomplished virtue embodies [a broad learning] that incorporates everything, and thus he is completely well-rounded in his applications, and not merely someone who displays a single talent or skill.”

Part I: Conversation

Liberal education depends on conversation. Conversation between a teacher and a student; conversation among students inside and outside the classroom; conversations with the traditions of learning; conversations with the past.

The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer spoke of the encounter with a text from the past in terms of a “fusion of horizons,” an expression that has always reminded me of the paintings of J. M. W. Turner, whose “Stormy Sea Breaking on a Shore” from the Yale Center for British Art is shown here. As Gadamer explains in an important passage from Truth and Method , “The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point.” Metaphorically, we can speak of people with narrow or broad horizons, that is people who have very limited ideas and people who see many other points of view. What is important about the metaphor of the horizon is that it both suggests that we can see a certain distance and calls attention to the limited range of our sight. There is always something beyond our horizon that we do not yet know or have not yet seen. The nature of a conversation, including conversations with texts, is that we try to make our horizon match the horizon of the person we’re talking to. Gadamer gives as an example of an unproductive conversation the oral examination, in which the examiner seeks to find out what the examinee knows, but not really to learn from him or her, and not to arrive at a real understanding. By contrast with this, the true “fusion of horizons” for Gadamer consists in really engaging with the other and thus in opening up our horizon for possible changes. Our horizon is always ready to change as we grow and learn and develop, and the real fusion of horizons with the past involves the potential for such change. Our encounter with the past, Gadamer argues, is part of what allows this development. The problem of interpretation, as he also says, is the problem of all understanding, namely how to engage in this dialogue with others, with texts, with the world, by which we at once challenge our own horizons and seek to learn something from and speak back to the rest of the world.

Now Gadamer was concerned with the philosophy of interpretation, but it is no accident that the most characteristic form of liberal arts education in the United States is the seminar in which a professor and a group of students grapple with the interpretation of an important text, or work of art, or piece of evidence. Liberal education allows students to test their own ideas against those of their classmates, their professors, the great works of the past, and the most important current research in their fields of study. It also demands that they learn some of the tools of interpretation in a variety of disciplines, so that they can approach problems from multiple perspectives. Ideally, liberal education also leads students from different backgrounds to encounter diverse and disparate cultures. Not only do students bring these distant cultures together through their studies, but they themselves encounter different backgrounds and patterns of thought through the diverse student body with which they share this educational journey. Indeed, liberal education leads students not just to encounter distant cultures, but to redefine what they understand as “distant,” forming their own pictures of the world and its global conversations.

In the context of liberal education, students are encouraged to enter into such conversations first-hand, through small classes, discussion groups, and laboratories. Here, they become active participants in their own learning process, deriving new, diverse methods for encountering problems ranging from social inequality to the age of the universe. Working alongside their fellow students, they are encouraged to broaden their perspectives and to solve problems within a group, making decisions on the basis of others’ advice, but also learning to be accountable for their own ideas and contributions [see Laloux, 100-4]. This feature of liberal education is one of the reasons that it can propel students toward innovative approaches, which can be valuable in their later working life. Through this group work, students come to recognize that innovation is not just the product of a single brilliant mind working in a vacuum, but of the continued, concerted efforts of teams that discuss, encourage, criticize, test, and refine new ideas.

Such conversations between individual students and the group or groups in which they participate become part of daily life through the system of residential colleges. The collegiate model goes all the way back to medieval Oxford and Cambridge, but similar communities of learning existed in China even earlier. By living alongside peers with a variety of different backgrounds, experiences, and interests, students learn to coexist with others, even in situations where their opinions or expectations may differ widely from one another. [see Harry Lewis, 79] Residential colleges continue the work of liberal education beyond the classroom, promoting compromise over unilateral decision-making, and a recognition of others’ humanity and worth over the primacy of a single student’s individual needs. Students become leaders among their peers, but also learn to listen to what their peers have to say, forging and evaluating solutions together. Further, residential colleges lead students to see their education not as a “job” that is localized to a single classroom or laboratory, but as a vocation, a collection of many “roles” that they play in relation to others [Laloux, 90, 119]. By learning to move fluidly among these roles and to integrate education into their everyday lives, students create an innovative space in which they might reevaluate and adapt the lessons of the classroom into real-world conversations. In such communities, students participate in the sports, clubs, societies, musical groups, and student publications that create a lively civil society in parallel with the official curriculum taught by the faculty. Supported by a residential staff that pays attention to their emotional and social needs, students find this period of their lives a great opportunity for personal growth and for developing their abilities as citizens and leaders.

Despite liberal education’s broad success in fostering an environment that promotes conversation and innovation, there remain aspects of a traditional liberal education that call for reform and innovation. This is a task which has been taken up both in the older liberal arts institutions of the West and in the new or recreated institutions of Asia. To say that liberal education requires some rethinking in the twenty-first century is simply to recognize that colleges and universities, like other great institutions, must change in response to history, technology, and the needs of our students [Laloux, 15]. I want to outline here a few of liberal education’s pitfalls, so that we can then discuss how this form of learning might be improved and enlivened to serve the needs of our twenty-first-century students. It seems to me that the most telling critiques of liberal education can be summarized in terms of the problem of character.

On the one hand, colleges and universities have often promised to shape the character of their students, while on the other, critics such as the former Harvard College Dean Harry Lewis (no relation) and my friend and former Yale colleague William Deresiewicz have pointed to weaknesses especially in elite American educational institutions. While I do not share all of their analyses of the situation, I do think they raise important issues. As competition for entry into the top institutions continues to increase, there are risks that those who attend, for example, Ivy League colleges, will come from a narrower stratum of society, will see themselves as entitled, will avoid risks and stick to safe subjects and pursuits, and will be treated by their institutions as the customers who are proverbially always right rather than challenged to grow and sometimes to fail.

Probably the most important issue here is one of access. Given increasingly tough competition for spots in the top universities of the world, those born into privileged families can take advantage of better primary and secondary education, tutors, admissions coaches, and other advantages that help them to gain admission to elite institutions. These institutions have recognized the problem and devoted considerable resources to seeking out students from poor backgrounds or from under-represented minorities, but it is still the case that most students at Ivy League colleges come from families that are upper middle-class or wealthy, and that relatively few talented students from the poorer segments of society receive the kind of college preparation that allows them to attend the Ivy League. Even among those who might benefit from an Ivy League education, ignorance of the opportunities or fear of the cost may prevent them from applying. This is not a problem with an easy solution; colleges and universities rightly seek to promote diversity, but ultimately some of these problems are a product of a stratified social structure and the poor opportunities at earlier levels of education for the underprivileged in the United States. Having lived in Canada, the United States, and now Singapore, I suppose the best I could hope would be that the United States might adopt a public education system more like Canada’s or Singapore’s so that more of its young people would be ready for the opportunities presented by its outstanding university system. In the meantime, colleges and universities should continue to seek out a diverse array of students with high potential and should place greater emphasis on developing an ethos of service among their students so that those who are privileged to attend the great universities recognize their responsibility for giving back to the broader community. Even among the children of the elite who do ultimately get in to the top universities, there may be negative effects in the pressure of competing for these spots. One risk is that high school students (and even younger children) who are influenced by well-meaning but driven parents might learn to view their studies and extracurricular activities only through the prism of what will get them into the College of their dreams, and that the joy of learning for its own sake, or playing a sport or a musical instrument, or participating in a life-enhancing activity, will be reduced to a line on an admissions form or “brag sheet.”

One of the main criticisms of the liberal education provided once students arrive at leading institutions has been that it caters more to student desires or fads than to challenging students or building their characters [Lewis, 93 ff .]. In many curricula, for instance, relatively weak general education requirements have allowed the opening of a rift between disciplines, with the humanities and natural sciences on opposite sides of this divide and the social sciences hovering somewhat uncertainly toward the middle. In this situation – a modern variant of C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” – students and faculty seem increasingly unable to traverse the space between the disciplines. Humanities majors think that science is too “difficult” or “objective”; science majors think that the humanities are too “soft” or “subjective.” If given the opportunity, many students avoid taking courses outside of their own discipline, or, in the case of “distribution requirements,” they often take the easiest, most watered-down courses they can find. This situation does not, as some might think, help students to specialize in a single field, but rather, makes certain that they will remain distrustful of concepts and forms of learning beyond their own blinkered purview. In fact, this isolation of the disciplines prevents innovation, since it stands in the way of students bringing together multiple disciplines in order to make all of their studies richer, adapting vocabularies and ideas from one discipline to another in order to create an interdisciplinary conversation. Rather than building students’ characters through intellectual and interdisciplinary challenges, such forms of liberal education allow them to remain within their academic comfort zones.

Furthermore, in many liberal education programs and particularly in the United States, curricula artificially limit the scope of their students’ education even before they arrive on campus. Even in institutions that boast cohesive, challenging liberal education curricula, the focus is often exclusively on Western thought, with relatively weak gestures toward comparison with sources outside of Western Europe and America. In addition, many schools place a disproportionate focus on liberal education in the humanities, with students required to take only superficial, watered-down courses in quantitative or natural sciences. This exacerbates the “two cultures” problem, and, ironically, does a disservice to both sides of the disciplinary divide, since it paints the humanities as easy enough for any student to learn, marks the sciences as too difficult, and provides students with a rather lopsided, insufficiently challenging education.

One further challenge of current liberal education programs bears mentioning: the problem of forging a deeper link between living and learning, between undergraduate student life and the educational mission of the college or university. Student extracurricular life can be a source of education as lasting and important as that of the formal curriculum, but there are also many institutions where extracurricular life is dominated by partying or where well-meaning student life staff are not really seen as partners in the educational enterprise. Such institutions lose the opportunity for many of the important synergies that make college a time not only for intellectual but also for personal and civic growth.

Finally, a common complaint about academia today concerns the perceived over-emphasis on research at the expense of teaching. While I do think that there are a number of problems with the incentive structure in academia that sometimes grant tenure and promotion to indifferent or even bad teachers, and that discourage some faculty from truly engaging with their students, I think that it would be a mistake to assume that the relationship between research and teaching is a zero-sum game. Some faculty may ignore their teaching duties while pushing to get tenure; others may churn out publications of minimal importance. For the most part, however, the opportunity to conduct specialized research allows faculty to develop their knowledge of their fields and to hone their own intellects, allowing them to share this learning, in turn, with their students. The caricature of the researcher who sees students as a mere distraction is, in my experience, unrepresentative. Most faculty seek a balance between teaching and research, and many of the best researchers are in fact also excellent teachers, because the factors that go into good research and good teaching are closely intertwined: intelligence, devotion to learning, and hard work. There is, however, some risk that by over-emphasizing research in our rewards system (tenure, promotion, salary), we might encourage faculty to become too absorbed in their research and that this has a negative impact on their teaching, too, as they may undergraduates like proto-graduate students, grading undergraduate work as if it were a credential for graduate school rather than tailoring courses to fit undergraduate needs, and expecting students to become premature specialists rather than allowing them to explore subjects broadly.

The challenge here lies in balance. Faculty should have the freedom to pursue their own research, so that they can advance knowledge and infuse their teaching with new, future-facing ideas. They should also teach a curriculum that is inspiring and demanding, yet tailored to a class of undergraduates who likely will not become specialists in a given academic field. Instead, professors should teach students with the expectation that they will be adapting their liberal education to a world beyond the academy, from the arts to law, medicine to business, government to non-governmental organizations. They need not pander to students’ career goals, but should allow this breadth of application to infuse their approach to their specialized subjects, allowing both students and faculty to see beyond the subject at hand to its larger importance. Finally, faculty should serve not just as teachers, but also as mentors to their students, bridging the gap between the time in the classroom and students’ lives beyond. In some liberal education institutions, this bridge is facilitated by designated faculty who live on campus as residential fellows but it need not be so formal. Faculty should embody for their students the connection – yet another ongoing conversation – between learning and life.

As twenty-first-century educators, how might we address these challenges of liberal education while also retaining the traditional strengths of this mode of education? How might we create an innovative form of liberal education which itself promotes innovation? These are questions that my colleagues and I have asked ourselves repeatedly as we’ve forged ahead in the process of creating a new institution for liberal education at Yale-NUS College. It’s a rare and exciting opportunity to draw on the history of the liberal arts and sciences and on current best practices, and then to then apply one’s findings to a practical outcome [cf. UVA: Roth, 27], yet at Yale-NUS, this is precisely the chance we’ve experienced over the past several years. As all of us here are well aware, some of the most innovative applications of liberal education these days are to be found not just in the ivy-covered institutions of the United States but in the ancient courtyards and quickly rising campuses of Asia. The opportunity to think about new or renovated Asian versions of liberal education gives us the opportunity to see what is most relevant in these methods and what can be adapted for greater success in the future.

One of the first innovations that we introduced at Yale-NUS was a rigorous common curriculum. This addressed several of the pitfalls I’ve just discussed by including texts both Western and non-Western, pairing Confucius with Aristotle, the Odyssey with the Ramayana, and also bringing modern texts from throughout Asia and the West in conversation with each other. Such a comparative approach is not just limited to the humanities, as courses on “Comparative Social Institutions” and “Historical Immersion” carry this global scope into the social sciences, as well. In addition, our common curriculum gives a broad and rigorous introduction to the methods of the humanities, social sciences, and the natural sciences. Out of ten required courses, three are focused in the natural sciences, and one in quantitative reasoning. Rather than treating non-majors to watered-down courses, each course in our common curriculum is designed to challenge students to understand a variety of disciplinary approaches and ways of thinking. This teaches students to become proficient in and understand the applications of multiple subjects, as well as to bring these together in their work in and beyond the university.

We created the common curriculum with one central question in mind: “What must a young person learn in order to lead a responsible life in this century?” In other words, what education must we provide for our students such that they continue to learn and create new ideas once they leave our campus? How do we ensure that they live what Socrates called “the examined life,” thinking critically about their own values, and at the same time have the opportunity for an active life, one that allows them to make a difference beyond the campus walls.

One solution was already open to us: by placing our school in Asia, we were able to bring together students from a variety of backgrounds, including adventurous students from all over the world. To give you a sense of the resulting diversity, our entering class in 2013, comprising about 150 students, was about 40% international, including students from six continents—only Antarctica has escaped our intrepid admissions officers! This sort of diversity allows students to explore new practices and viewpoints simply by working with their peers. It also allows them to embrace risk and the possibility of failure [Tellis, Black], since our students know that they will encounter others with habits, traditions, and languages that are entirely new to them, and that they will have to test and retest methods for finding a middle ground. Because our students have come from far and near, and from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds, they are primed to become self-reliant and to probe traditional knowledge with an open but critical mind [Roth, 60-3]. We strive to capitalize upon these instincts through an education that leads them even further beyond their comfort zones. As an international community of learning, we teach our students to to discover and create new opportunities in their world.

As I’ve already mentioned, we have also refocused our liberal education curriculum to include in-depth scientific training for all students, as well as required classes in social science and quantitative methods. This, too, challenges students to move beyond their areas of comfort and to gain the knowledge that will help them to study and evaluate their quickly changing world. In the course of the past decade, much has been said about the failure of traditional liberal education programs to furnish students with the tools to make wise financial decisions or to vote on hot-topic political issues. By introducing all of our students not just to “science” or “math,” but to the structure of scientific inquiry – we are providing them with the vocabulary and confidence to think critically within their own disciplines and future careers, as well as to become responsible citizens and leaders. At times, innovation means simply possessing the awareness of what needs innovating, and we expect that a training in all three branches – science, social science, and humanities – will equip our students with precisely this skill.

In addition to this in-class curriculum, we’ve designed a program that requires students to bring their campus-bound learning into the world, to make education into innovation. All students at Yale-NUS take part in a program called “Learning Across Boundaries,” in which students spend a week in off-campus projects, becoming immersed in such topics as biodiversity in Spain, Burmese literature, or Buddhist philosophy in Kyoto, Japan. Much like the “20% time” set aside by major corporations for their employees to pursue self-driven, innovative projects [Tellis], these off-campus trips provide students with a canvas on which to experiment with the skills they’ve learned in class. Students are driven to understand the world not just intellectually, but practically, to apply their education as a basis for engagement and empathy [Roth, 18]. By going out into the world as a part of their common curriculum at Yale-NUS, students practice bridging the gap between world and campus, precisely the same bridge that they will cross as they graduate from our institution. We hope that this practice in bringing liberal education to real-world applications will allow our students to replicate and expand upon their experiences at Yale-NUS by creating their own innovations in the world. This is our tradition of innovation.

In building innovation into the foundational structure of liberal education at Yale-NUS, we’ve also sought to recruit our faculty as champions of innovation and change. By placing faculty in “divisions” that are inherently interdisciplinary, we strive to break down the silos inherited from the traditional nineteenth-century organization of research universities, resulting in an integration of disciplines that is emulated in our students’ common curriculum. Faculty participate in workshops and teach in teams that help them to generate new ideas regarding both research and pedagogy.

Through a broad but well-defined and intensive common curriculum, the integration of different disciplines, the drawing together of world and campus, and finally the recruitment of an energetic faculty with a strong commitment to undergraduate education, we at Yale-NUS have striven to create an international community of learning. Our community is founded in the conversations facilitated by the liberal education tradition and it addresses head-on the challenges that liberal education has confronted as it adapts to the twenty-first century and spreads throughout the world. Most of all, our community is founded on the idea that we wish to teach students to anticipate change, to ask future-facing questions, to take on risks, and to carry their learning beyond the walls of our campus. Through interdisciplinary, international knowledge, through self-reliance and teamwork, we wish to create a campus of innovators. We have summarized our mission as follows:

A Community of Learning Founded by two great universities In Asia, for the world.

I am honored to share this vision with colleagues here in China, and I hope that the traditions of liberal education will continue to enliven Asian educational systems in the generations to come, shaping a generation of Asian leaders who are also citizens of the world.

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Warnings about the decline of the liberal arts are ubiquitous these days, but they are hardly new. Jacques Barzun, the renowned scholar and dean at Columbia University, pronounced the liberal arts tradition “dead or dying” in 1963. Barzun may have spoken too soon, but by various measures, liberal learning is worse off today than it was then. Liberal arts colleges seem an endangered species as curricula shift toward science, technology, engineering, and math—the STEM disciplines. Students want jobs, not debt, and who can blame them?

The conversation around the liberal arts hasn’t changed much. It often sounds like this: “Many students and their parents now seek a clear and early connection between the undergraduate experience and employment. Vocationalism exerts pressure for substantive changes in the curriculum and substitutes a preoccupation with readily marketable skills.” But those words were written by Donald L. Berry in 1977.

The liberal arts ideal still has its eloquent defenders, and there is evidence that good jobs go to liberal arts graduates—eventually. Despite the popularity of business and technology courses, students are not abandoning the liberal arts in droves. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, degrees in the humanities, in proportion to all bachelor’s degrees, declined just 0.1 percent from 1980 to 2010, from 17.1 percent to 17.0 percent.

While defending liberal learning, however, educators might also ask some more basic questions: What do we mean by the “liberal arts,” and why should one study them at all? Why do we rely on two standard answers—critical thinking and citizenship? What exactly do those terms mean (if they mean anything “exactly”) and how are they related?

What Are the Liberal Arts?

The idea of the liberal arts has a nearly two-thousand-year history, dating to Latin writers of late antiquity, but the underlying questions about mankind, nature, and knowledge go back to the Greeks. Over the past century and a half, America has emerged as a superpower while adhering to a predominantly liberal arts model of higher education. But liberal arts is also a complicated and antiquated term, yoking together two words that don’t obviously belong in harness and may not be ideally suited for hauling their intellectual load into the twenty-first century.

Liberal comes from the notion of freeing the mind; there’s nothing wrong with that. As classics scholar Katie Billotte writes on Salon , “The Latin ars liberalis refers to the skills required of a free man—that is the skills of a citizen.” But arts , in the Greek and Roman world, had a different connotation: the Greek term techne meant skill or applied knowledge and had nothing to do with aesthetics as we know it.

Originally there were seven liberal arts: the trivium of classical antiquity, consisting of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, combined with the medieval quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. As early as the twelfth-century renaissance, when universities emerged from the monastic and cathedral schools of Italy and France, those “arts” were supplemented in the curriculum by philosophy, jurisprudence, theology, and medicine.

Clearly, the model has evolved since then. Neither liberal nor arts is an essential or complete descriptor of what we consider a liberal education. Linguistic conventions have limited malleability, and avoiding the term liberal arts may not be feasible. Questioning such terms, however—and paying careful attention to language in general—are quintessential liberal arts practices.

There are at least three nested, and largely tacit, conceptions of the liberal arts in common usage. One, typified by America’s liberal arts colleges, embraces the ideal of the integrated curriculum, encompassing virtually all nonprofessional higher learning, from the natural and social sciences to the humanities and the performing arts. At its best, this comprehensive vision recognizes both the value and the limitations of such categories, along with the consequent need for interdisciplinary learning. In fact, some of the most exciting scholarship is now happening between disciplines, not within them.

Free minds are flexible minds, trained to recognize that many areas of inquiry are interconnected and many disciplinary boundaries are porous. Categories are instrumental and practical: our tools, not our masters. Using them without obscuring the underlying connections is another hallmark of higher-level thinking. Climate change and biodiversity, for example, cannot be fully understood unless seen as both distinct and related phenomena.

In fact, two intertwining assumptions, among others, underlie the modern liberal arts tradition. One is that every academic discipline has unique questions to ask, and thus its own techniques and epistemology. The other is that each discipline is also linked to others through common questions, techniques, and ways of knowing. Critical thinking is a key part of that shared epistemology, a set of skills that apply across the liberal arts curriculum.

A second frequent usage of the term liberal arts implicitly excludes (but doesn’t denigrate) the sciences; and a third, still narrower, sense of the term focuses mainly on the humanities. Each of these implied definitions may be valid in particular contexts, as long as we’re clear about what we mean, but the comprehensive one would seem the most useful overall. “Whatever else a liberal education is,” the philosopher of education Paul H. Hirst writes, “it is not a vocational education, not an exclusively scientific education [and] not a specialist education in any sense.” It is rather “an education based fairly and squarely on the nature of knowledge itself.”

This idea of “the nature of knowledge” right away implicates philosophy, which is largely concerned with knowledge and thinking. However unloved or misunderstood by many Americans, philosophy is the mother of liberal learning. Economics, psychology, sociology, political science, and linguistics are just some of its younger offspring. The various disciplines contain it in their DNA—partly in the form of critical thinking. Those disciplines constitute the system for organizing and understanding the known world— human beings, societies, nature—that we refer to archaically as “the liberal arts.” We isolate the rubrics of natural science, social science, and humanities, and their various subdisciplines, to the extent useful or necessary.

Indeed, a defining feature of any system is the concomitant stability and plasticity of its parts. The liberal arts form such an evolving system, consisting of stable but impermanent fields of inquiry that fuse at some points and fissure at others, adapting to cultural shifts while sharing a common language and assumptions, overlapping knowledge bases, and the core of critical thinking. Thus, we distinguish between psychology and philosophy, or between the scientist’s view of nature and the poet’s, but we also acknowledge the connections. In art, we look for the differences between impressionism and postimpressionism but also for the commonalities and historical continuities.

But however we define the liberal arts, no unique approach and no single method, text, or institution perfectly exemplifies the idea. In fact, it isn’t one value or idea so much as a group of ideas that share what Ludwig Wittgenstein called a “family resemblance.” At its best, a liberal education isn’t intended to inculcate practical skills or to dump data into students’ brains, though it may teach a fact or two. Instead, it’s a wellspring of ideas and questions, and a way of promoting flexibility and openness to diverse perspectives.

Why Do We Need the Liberal Arts?

The liberal arts have traditionally been defended as instrumental to two key elements of democracy: critical thinking and citizenship. Such arguments are indeed compelling, once it is clear what we mean by those complex notions. (Another feature of the liberal mind is that it doesn’t shrink from complexity.) Citizenship, first of all, isn’t just a political notion in the ordinary sense. Like the term liberal arts , it’s more comprehensive and systemic: a social ecology involving a range of activities symbiotic with democratic communities. Three dimensions of that ecology are easy to identify.

One is the traditional civic dimension, which embraces a range of activities such as voting and jury service, advocacy, volunteering, dialogue and information sharing, and other forms of participation in the public sphere.

A second dimension is economic citizenship, which means being a productive member of a community: doing something useful for oneself and for others, whether in a factory, farm, home, office, garage, or boardroom. It’s also about being a critical consumer and seeing the connections between the political and economic spheres.

A third kind of citizenship (and the particular focus of the humanities) is cultural citizenship, through participation in the various conversations that constitute a culture. This is arguably the most family-friendly of the three. Take your kids to see The Nutcracker , or for that matter to a circus, a house of worship, or a ballgame. The arts, religion, and sports are all potential venues for cultural conversations. It’s no accident that many of our liberal arts colleges were founded by religious sects and host cultural events, sponsor campus organizations, and field sports teams. All are important forms of community.

These three forms of citizenship interrelate in subtle as well as obvious ways, and they are only the most visible bands on a spectrum of possible communal engagement. One could argue for other forms alongside or within them: environmental, informational, moral, or global citizenship, or civic engagement through leadership, mentoring, teaching, or military or other public service. But ultimately, it isn’t about parsing the idea of citizenship. The overall goal is to foster vibrant and prosperous communities with broad and deep participation, in public conversations marked by fairness, inclusion, and (where critical thinking comes in) intellectual rigor.

A liberal education is not about developing professional or entrepreneurial skills, although it may well promote them. Nor is it for everyone; we need pilots, farmers, and hairdressers as well as managers, artists, doctors, and engineers. But we all need to be well-informed, critical citizens. And the liberal arts prepare students for citizenship in all three senses—civic, economic, and cultural.

What Is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is the intellectual engine of a functional democracy: the set of mental practices that lends breadth, depth, clarity, and consistency to public discourse. It’s what makes thinking in public truly public and sharable. And yet, like the liberal arts and citizenship, critical thinking isn’t monolithic or easy to describe. An initial definition might begin like this: whereas philosophy is about thought in general, critical thinking is about my thinking or yours or someone else’s in the here and now.

Digging deeper, however, we find in critical thinking another web of ideas with a family resemblance rather than a fixed set of shared properties. In fact, there is little agreement in the considerable literature on critical thinking about precisely what critical thinking is or how it is propagated. As education researcher Lisa Tsui notes, “Because critical thinking is a complex skill, any attempt to offer a full and definitive definition of it would be futile.”

Moreover, there tends to be some clumping within the bundle of ideas associated with critical thinking. For example, educators often cite the ability to identify assumptions, draw inferences, distinguish facts from opinions, draw conclusions from data, and judge the authority of arguments and sources. But that’s just one important clump in the bundle. And these are not simply discrete intellectual skills; they are general and overlapping, and they admit of degrees. Assimilating them isn’t like learning the multiplication table.

The rules and guideposts of informal logic help us to make sound arguments, avoid fallacies, and recognize our systemic human propensity for biases and misperceptions. (An excellent catalog of such pitfalls is Rolf Dobelli’s The Art of Thinking Clearly .) Students who are college-ready have already absorbed at least the rudiments of this kind of critical thinking, even without formal training, much as we absorb elementary grammar by reading, listening, and writing.

Critical inquiry within the liberal arts curriculum goes well beyond that. Under the same broad rubric of critical thinking, it involves a suite of more advanced intellectual competencies, which bear the mark of the mother discipline we inherited from the Greeks. In fact, critical inquiry is the bridge between basic critical thinking and philosophy, and it’s where most higher learning takes place.

The advanced skills that form that bridge include thinking independently, an almost self-evident intellectual virtue but a vague one (and no mind is an island); thinking outside the box (likewise crucial but unspecific); grasping the different forms and divisions of knowledge and how they are acquired (but the forms of knowledge and ways of acquiring them evolve); seeing distinctions and connections beyond the obvious; distinguishing reality from appearance; and engaging with complexity, but not for its own sake. We venerate truth, for example, while recognizing that there are different types and degrees of truth, some more elusive or impermanent than others. All of these perspectives have value, but they aren’t reducible to neat formulas. In the end, critical inquiry is not a map or a list of firm rules but a set of navigational skills.

The assimilation of facts, ideas, and conceptual frameworks, and the development of critical minds, are equal parts of a liberal education. Or almost equal: at least outside the hard sciences, the intellectual tools and standards of rigor may have more lasting value than accrued factual knowledge. Precisely because they transcend the knowledge bases of the various disciplines, critical-thinking skills enable students to become lifelong learners and engaged citizens—in all three senses of citizenship—and to adapt to change and to multiple career paths. Thus, as William Deresiewicz observes, “The first thing that college is for is to teach you to think.”

Developing a facility with abstractions is part of the progression toward more sophisticated thinking that a liberal education affords. But that intellectual ascent doesn’t require a leap into the maelstrom of philosophy. This is partly because philosophers deal with a number of issues that are of no particular concern to other students and scholars, and it’s partly because philosophy isn’t a substitute for other forms of knowledge. We still have to conjugate verbs, understand economic cycles, and listen to stories. But there’s another reason we can acknowledge philosophy’s role in the liberal arts without having to study philosophy itself: we are already philosophers in spite of ourselves, simply because we use language.

In our ordinary thought and speech we use abstractions all the time. We form (and qualify) generalizations, commute between the general and the particular, make distinctions and connections, draw analogies, compare classes and categories, employ various types of reasoning, hone definitions and meanings, and analyze words, ideas, and things to resolve or mitigate their ambiguity. These are precisely the skills that a liberal education cultivates. It heightens our abilities to speak, listen, write, and think, making us better learners, communicators, team members, and citizens.

The Importance of Critical Inquiry

The college-level progression toward more sophisticated reasoning isn’t just a matter of analytic thinking as a formal process. It is also reflected in certain organizing concepts that (like critical inquiry itself) transcend the various disciplines and unify the liberal arts curriculum. These concepts include truth, nature, value, causality, complexity, morality, freedom, excellence, and—as Wittgenstein understood—language itself, as the principal medium of thought. Critical inquiry, like philosophy, begins but doesn’t end with careful attention to language.

This is something Wittgenstein failed to recognize. In seeking to bring philosophy to a close, by revealing its problems to be essentially linguistic ones, he paradoxically gave the field an enormous boost of fresh intellectual energy. “Mere” linguistic problems, it turns out, are philosophical problems—they are problems about meaning, knowledge, reality, and our minds, not just about words—and we all have to deal with them, whether as art historians, economists, or biologists. Wittgenstein isn’t considered the twentieth century’s greatest philosopher for having been the last to turn out the lights.

The aforementioned concepts (and arguably some others) pervade virtually all branches of knowledge and reflect their common ancestry in classical Western thought. A slew of other important ideas, such as scientific method, transference, foreshadowing, three-point perspective, opportunity cost, immanent critique, double-blind study, hubris, kinship, or means testing, do not.

Clearly there are no fixed rules governing this conversation; its signature is its openness. The roster of organizing concepts I’ve suggested is partial and contestable; in the end, they may simply be convenient ways of carving reality “at the joints,” as Plato suggests. They are not substitutes for, or shortcuts to, knowledge or understanding. But they form a general roadmap indicating what students can expect to find, and the useful navigational skills they may acquire, if they venture onto the rich intellectual terrain of the liberal arts.

The STEM disciplines are obviously important to economic productivity, but so is the entire rainbow of human knowledge and the ability to think critically. That’s why nations around the world are beginning to embrace the liberal arts idea that American education has done so much to promote, even as we question it. We need skilled thinkers, problem solvers, team workers, and communicators, and not just in the business, scientific, and technology sectors. The liberal arts embody precisely the skills a democracy must cultivate to maintain its vital reservoir of active, thoughtful, humane, and productive citizens.

Jeffrey Scheuer is the author of two books on media and politics and a work in progress about critical thinking and liberal education. His website is at http://www.jscheuer.com , and his e-mail address is [email protected] .

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Liberal Arts FAQ
A liberal arts education is all about asking questions. In fact, many of the critical-thinking skills and problem-solving methods that these degrees teach involve learning precisely how to ask the right questions in the first place. A liberal arts education gives you the skills you need to answer the big questions in life… and the small ones.
Your Biggest Liberal Arts Questions, Answered
A: A liberal arts degree is grounded in the ideas of humanities and the arts and encompasses literature, philosophy, social and physical sciences and math. The "arts" in "liberal arts" aren't limited to fine or performing arts, but denote a method of broad-based learning in many disciplines. The word "liberal" also gets lost in ...
What a Liberal Arts College Is and What Students Should Know
This kind of degree emphasizes a broad education and so-called soft skills like communication and writing proficiency, analytical thinking and leadership ability. At liberal arts colleges ...
The Value of a Liberal Arts Education is More Than Most Know
The liberal arts take their name from the Latin word "liber," which means "free.". Originally this referred to the education of free persons as distinct from slaves, but freedom is still at the root of the liberal arts. Liberal arts are a privilege of a free society, and the study of the liberal arts helps to keep us free.
PDF liberal arts education lecture for Thales
As a system of education, the liberal arts formed the moral and intellectual foundation of one of the world's great civilizations. This observation seems to exclude non-Western thought from the liberal arts.5 After all, no one argues that the Greeks learned the liberal arts from the ancient East. This observation does exclude the idea that ...
A Historical and Global Perspective on Liberal Arts Education: What Was
This discussion presents liberal education's non-Western, ... Questions are being raised about whether vocational-oriented curricula are producing human capital with the right kind of skills for the quickly evolving knowledge economy. ... "What a Liberal Arts Education is . . . and is Not," Bard Institute for International Liberal ...
A Guide to the Discourse About Liberal Education
Arguments about liberal arts accumulate slowly, almost imperceptibly, on the forest floor of higher education. The detritus of more than a century of episodes in the rhetorical life of liberal arts education, they are built up by cycles of the fierce argument, exuberant expansion, portents of doom, and beneficient forgetting that characterize modern higher education's…
What Does Liberal Arts Mean?
A liberal arts education offers an expansive intellectual grounding in all kinds of humanistic inquiry. By exploring issues, ideas and methods across the humanities and the arts, and the natural and social sciences, you will learn to read critically, write cogently and think broadly. These skills will elevate your conversations in the classroom ...
The Value of the Liberal Arts
A fourth value of liberal arts education is its emphasis on the skills of learning, and of constructing knowledge out of information. We live in an increasingly complex information environment, where the sheer quantity of information - and its intentional manipulation into disinformation - overwhelms people's abilities to make sense of it ...
The value of a liberal-arts education
A liberal education—including, for example, philosophy, art and sociology as well as math and physics—educates the whole person, and prepares students to excel in a range of careers and, most importantly, live lives rich with meaning and purpose. A liberal-arts education teaches students to learn how to learn, and inspires them to go on ...
Liberal Arts & Sciences
Concentrations. You have many options when pursuing your Harvard degree. We offer more than 3,700 courses in 50 undergraduate fields of study, which we call concentrations. A number of our concentrations are interdisciplinary. View all Concentrations. Double Concentrations. Joint Concentrations. Special Concentrations.
The enduring relevance and benefits of a liberal arts education
The relevance, cost and value of a college education have been hot topics lately on various media platforms. The discussion often seems to be just an exchange of point-counterpoint broadsides among proponents and opponents of a liberal-arts education. As president of a liberal-arts college, I won't pretend to be neutral. I have benefited from ...
The Workforce Relevance of Liberal Arts Education
This discussion series is intended to be just the beginning, inspiring more discussions with other contributors who have a stake in the future of liberal arts education. The recommendations, questions, and examples in this report ... Workforce Relevance of Liberal Arts Education Roundtable Series Participating Institutions *
What Is A Liberal Arts Education? And Why Is It More Important Than
A diverse and inclusive intellectual community is critical to an exceptional education, scholarly innovation, and human creativity. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is committed to actions and investments that foster welcoming environments where everyone feels empowered to achieve their greatest potential for learning, teaching, researching, and creating.
12 Benefits of a Liberal Arts Education • Southwestern University
A liberal arts education prepares students to examine ideas from multiple points of view, solve problems, adapt, and collaborate. By combining multiple disciplines of study, liberal arts colleges expose students to a wide range of subjects, encouraging them to think outside a narrow focus and contribute to original solutions - all skills that ...
PDF Best Practices of Liberal Arts Education: Curricula in Liberal Arts
Within the context of higher education, questions regarding liberal arts education are frequently raised. Over the past 30 years, one of the most critical changes in American higher education has ... data for this study came from the rankings of the top 50 liberal arts colleges in the 2020 U.S. News and World Report, with a focus on the top 15 ...
What Is A Liberal Arts Education?
A liberal arts education teaches you to distinguish between claims and evidence, and between fact and opinion, and then to use facts and evidence to pursue informed agendas. These skills are honed first in the context of an area of major study, but they are also transferable skills, to be used in any—or many—context (s).
What Is a Liberal Arts College?
Written by Coursera • Updated on Jun 15, 2023. Liberal arts colleges differ from larger public universities and private institutions in a number of ways. A liberal arts college is a four-year undergraduate institution that takes a broader approach to education by focusing on the arts, sciences, humanities, and social sciences.
Liberal arts education
Philosophia et septem artes liberales, "philosophy and the seven liberal arts."From the Hortus deliciarum of Herrad of Landsberg (12th century). Liberal arts education (from Latin liberalis 'free' and ars 'art or principled practice') is the traditional academic course in Western higher education. Liberal arts takes the term art in the sense of a learned skill rather than specifically the fine ...
A return to understanding: Making liberal education valuable again
A follow-up study in 2012, almost 20 years later, using Breneman's criteria of liberal arts education, found that 'true' liberal arts colleges continue to be in decline (Baker, Baldwin, & Makker, Citation 2012). The decline is for the most part driven by the perceived necessity for liberal arts colleges to offer vocational education.
On the "core questions" for a liberal arts education
On the "core questions" for a liberal arts education. The guiding question of. vision. What shall be our guiding vision of a humane, just, and thriving human community in which all members have opportunity to live fully human lives? The question ofvirtue. What standards of excellence should a community encourage in its members so that they ...
What Is Liberal Arts? Definition and Examples
Published on April 29, 2019. Liberal arts is a field of study based on rational thinking, and it includes the areas of humanities, social and physical sciences, and mathematics. A liberal arts education emphasizes the development of critical thinking and analytical skills, the ability to solve complex problems, and an understanding of ethics ...
Liberal Education and Innovation
21 st-century liberal education should draw on the traditional strengths of the liberal arts tradition, which I will describe today as a series of conversations. At the same time, I will recognize certain important criticisms of existing liberal education programs, which focus on the shaping of students' characters through education.
PDF Torch Magazine • Winter 2019 Is a Liberal Arts Education Still Relevant
beyond. A liberal arts education does not prepare students for a specific profession; rather, the field of study is broad in nature. With a long-term career perspective in mind, in the end liberal arts majors may be better prepared than their STEM peers for constantly shifting and changing global job market demand and conditions. Liberal arts
Critical Thinking and the Liberal Arts
Warnings about the decline of the liberal arts are ubiquitous these days, but they are hardly new. Jacques Barzun, the renowned scholar and dean at Columbia University, pronounced the liberal arts tradition "dead or dying" in 1963. Barzun may have spoken too soon, but by various measures, liberal learning is worse off today than it was then. Liberal arts colleges seem an endangered species ...

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