What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

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Siwash
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What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by Siwash »

Old liberal arts guy here; graduated 25+ years ago from a small selective private college.

I'm wondering what the current appraisal is of (a) the value of a liberal arts degree, and (b) the liberal arts as fields of study themselves.

What do you think? What have you run across?
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bengal22
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by bengal22 »

I'm an old liberal arts guys as well(37 yrs ago).

Answers: a). $3,256,423.23 b). valuable to learn proper communication skills and how to think out of the box
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Tigermoose
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by Tigermoose »

I've got an English Literature MA in addition to a Masters of Information Management and a Bachelor of Science in Information Systems.

The ideology driving much of higher education Liberal Arts isn't worth a whole lot. The value of engaging with the great works of literature is priceless. Seeing how, with the mass availability of the great works in print and online, there is not much reason to attend a university to engage with the great works.

The best thing my M. A. did for me was to give me time off of work to engage with the classics. The highly political and degraded ideology pervading much of the Liberal Arts challenged me to better understand why they are so political and degraded. So take that for what it is worth.

To summarize: there is no need to pay someone thousands of dollars for them to indoctrinate you on how you should read and engage with literature. Worse yet, many in the liberal arts shun the great works in favor of political and ideological texts that are not art but propoganda and 'isms.'
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sport
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by sport »

The value of a liberal arts education can vary depending on the major selected. The university I attended offered BA degrees in Chemistry, Physics, Geology, and Mathematics along with English, Philosophy, History, etc. At least from an employment standpoint, the outlook for these subjects varies considerably.
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by yobria »

Value is the same as it's always been - somewhere between none (you go back to being a waiter after getting that degree) and very high (you go on to win a Nobel prize, etc).

On the other side of the equation, the cost is certainly higher than it once was. And I think people are more aware of the importance of a practical education. There's a reason the percent of folks majoring in English has dropped by half over the last 40 years.
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Peter Foley
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by Peter Foley »

There have been a number of studies regarding the value of a liberal arts degree. One item identified in these studies was that while a liberal arts degree does not offer an income advantage with your first job, it is correlated with higher paying subsequent jobs and promotions.
Last edited by Peter Foley on Tue Oct 16, 2012 2:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
MathWizard
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by MathWizard »

Not specifically to Liberal Arts major but here is the latest from CNN Money:

http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/16/news/ec ... SF_PF_Lead

Liberal Arts major could be quite broad.

I suspect that more comes from the abilities of the student going in rather than the actual major, as long
as there is a good library.
Khanmots
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by Khanmots »

What do you mean by value? What do you mean by liberal arts?

That said, I don't see most liberal arts degrees (excluding math and the like) as having much in the way of monetary value. Their value tends to primarily lie elsewhere.

Personally I wound up (somehow) taking an upper division philosophy course my first semester in uni and I got a *lot* out of it. While it wasn't the focus of the course, I changed the way I think as a result of it. Probably one of, if not the, most influential courses I took in my 7 years at uni.

That said, I'm likely earning more today as a result of this, but I wouldn't be in the position I am with a liberal arts degree. It's my engineering degree that opened the doors; my experience with that philosophy course simply helps make me a better engineer. If I had a pure philosophy degree with a single engineering course tacked on... well... I'd expect my value to employers to be far less.
LA johnson
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by LA johnson »

The focus is incorrect; the focus should be what was your major? A liberal arts degree depends in part on the required distribution of courses by the liberal arts university. My major was biology/chemistry, but I studied the classics, philosophy, music, anthropology, sociology, economics, math, language. This broad education served me well in the practice of law and gave me a leg over those who focused on a narrow education, such as political science or business. In short, my liberal arts degree allowed me to earn millions over my career. My son's major was philosophy but he is a pathologist.
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by Valuethinker »

Tigermoose wrote:
To summarize: there is no need to pay someone thousands of dollars for them to indoctrinate you on how you should read and engage with literature. Worse yet, many in the liberal arts shun the great works in favor of political and ideological texts that are not art but propoganda and 'isms.'
But of course The Great Gatsby, anything by Charles Dickens and, most especially, George Orwell, are highly informed by their political slant and 'message'. Shakespeare is of course playing political games on us all the time (most of which are obscure to a modern audience).

Dickens was a famous social (and hence political) activist.

Gatsby is surely one of the most powerful social critiques of our 21st century world that has been written, not dimmed in any way by the fact it was written in the 1920s.

There's no such thing as value-free art or literature.

That said, I share a concern that the post modernists have led to an excessive focus on that, rather than reading 'The Greats' for all they can give us, in full knowledge that they were highly biased (and, usually, Dead White European Males). At its worst, post modernists strike me (with very little knowledge) as playing clever head games (see the 2 Denis Arcand films 'The Decline of the American Empire' and its sequel 'The Barbarian Invasions' for a sense of what I mean, they are set amongst professors in a French Canadian university; also see Umberto Eco's writings (to the limited extent I understood them)).

1984 is a brilliant novel, for all that it is a political polemic.

(it used to give me a certain frisson that the HQ of the University of London, Senate House, was in fact the Ministry of Propaganda during WW2 where Orwell worked, and that therefore Room 101, the worst room in the world, in the Ministry of Truth, was downstairs from me when I was studying ;-).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Hou ... _London%29
Last edited by Valuethinker on Tue Oct 16, 2012 11:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by Valuethinker »

Siwash wrote:Old liberal arts guy here; graduated 25+ years ago from a small selective private college.

I'm wondering what the current appraisal is of (a) the value of a liberal arts degree, and (b) the liberal arts as fields of study themselves.

What do you think? What have you run across?
Here's the problem.

At the cost of a US private liberal arts college, either your parents need to be affluent or you need to fairly sure you can find your way into a lucrative middle class profession. Law was the old standbye, but that is breaking down. Otherwise you are going to be debt crippled. This job market is not likely to lift fully for years.

If you go to a 'top 20' college and/or are highly ranked in your class, that probably does not matter. You'll probably find a decent job. Some consulting firm, investment bank or postgrad entry into a lucrative profession.

But the cost is now so high it is not a dead cert. For a person of only middle class origins, they risk spending the rest of their life dealing with a crippling student debt.

On the value of the study itself it is unquestionable in making you a better human being. I'd love to be able to do a degree at say, Chicago (undergrad), now. Although you do have to work at making sure you get a real education (I would call 'real' things like languages, history, literature, philosophy, classics etc.) as its not a guarantee that all people graduating in liberal arts get that education, either because they are pursuing different ends (athletics, entry into law school etc.) and/or because the flexibility of modern curricula allow it.
Last edited by Valuethinker on Tue Oct 16, 2012 11:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by Valuethinker »

Peter Foley wrote:There have been a number of studies regarding the value of a liberal arts degree. One item identied in these studies was that while a liberal arts degree does not offer an income advantage with your first job, it is correlated with higher paying subsequent jobs and promotions.
Careful about sample bias though.

James Kwok on 'The Baseline Scenario' had a deconstruction of the success of Art History majors

http://baselinescenario.com/2012/01/18/ ... causation/

a 'gentleman' in 1700s London basically studied either theology, or the law. Then went into the Church, the Law or into businesses like Lloyds (ships and insurance), slave trading, plantations etc. If you were truly unlucky you wound up in the Army (in the Navy, there was prize money in wartime, so you could make your fortune taking French and Spanish merchantmen). See 'Barry Lyndon' (the novel and the Kubrick movie).
Valuethinker
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by Valuethinker »

Tigermoose wrote:I've got an English Literature MA in addition to a Masters of Information Management and a Bachelor of Science in Information Systems.

The ideology driving much of higher education Liberal Arts isn't worth a whole lot. The value of engaging with the great works of literature is priceless. Seeing how, with the mass availability of the great works in print and online, there is not much reason to attend a university to engage with the great works.'
I do think if you self study these things, you can easily wind up with a very fringe understanding of them.

You do have to get to grips with the canon of current understanding and perception about these writers. OK we can't attend whatever University James M. Macpherson teaches at, but we need to know what he says about the Civil War. Ditto Paul Kennedy and William Patterson about 20th Century US history (their survey books in the Oxford History of the USA are all brilliant).

Some of the online course systems like Coursera, that offer courses from the world's best universities, might be a way of doing that.
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by Tigermoose »

Valuethinker wrote:
Tigermoose wrote:
To summarize: there is no need to pay someone thousands of dollars for them to indoctrinate you on how you should read and engage with literature. Worse yet, many in the liberal arts shun the great works in favor of political and ideological texts that are not art but propoganda and 'isms.'
But of course The Great Gatsby, anything by Charles Dickens and, most especially, George Orwell, are highly informed by their political slant and 'message'. Shakespeare is of course playing political games on us all the time (most of which are obscure to a modern audience).

Dickens was a famous social (and hence political) activist.

Gatsby is surely one of the most powerful social critiques of our 21st century world that has been written, not dimmed in any way by the fact it was written in the 1920s.

There's no such thing as value-free art or literature.

That said, I share a concern that the post modernists have led to an excessive focus on that, rather than reading 'The Greats' for all they can give us, in full knowledge that they were highly biased (and, usually, Dead White European Males). At its worst, post modernists strike me (with very little knowledge) as playing clever head games (see the 2 Denis Arcand films 'The Decline of the American Empire' and its sequel 'The Barbarian Invasions' for a sense of what I mean, they are set amongst professors in a French Canadian university; also see Umberto Eco's writings (to the limited extent I understood them)).

1984 is a brilliant novel, for all that it is a political polemic.

(it used to give me a certain frisson that the HQ of the University of London, Senate House, was in fact the Ministry of Propaganda during WW2 where Orwell worked, and that therefore Room 101, the worst room in the world, in the Ministry of Truth, was downstairs from me when I was studying ;-).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Hou ... _London%29
A work of art can have a political message, but it transcends the mere temporaneous concerns and speaks to the human experience in all times and places. It leaves the reader free to decide for themselves, and often times introduces ambiguity and paradox. Propoganda does not address the common human experience, but seeks to subjegate the reader into its own ideological chains.

That's very cool about your proximity to the Ministry of Truth :) I remember listening to 1984 on a long road trip. I still remember just sitting in my car at a gas station in Illinois listening to Winston being broken into admittin that 2+2=5. Chilling. Yet we can see those forces of propoganda and political correctness at play in our own lives. Maybe not the same propoganda, but the same situation in our own experience.
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by Tigermoose »

Valuethinker wrote:
Tigermoose wrote:I've got an English Literature MA in addition to a Masters of Information Management and a Bachelor of Science in Information Systems.

The ideology driving much of higher education Liberal Arts isn't worth a whole lot. The value of engaging with the great works of literature is priceless. Seeing how, with the mass availability of the great works in print and online, there is not much reason to attend a university to engage with the great works.'
I do think if you self study these things, you can easily wind up with a very fringe understanding of them.

You do have to get to grips with the canon of current understanding and perception about these writers. OK we can't attend whatever University James M. Macpherson teaches at, but we need to know what he says about the Civil War. Ditto Paul Kennedy and William Patterson about 20th Century US history (their survey books in the Oxford History of the USA are all brilliant).

Some of the online course systems like Coursera, that offer courses from the world's best universities, might be a way of doing that.

I do think that certain high quality teachers are worth a substantial amount of money. Instead of paying substantial amounts of money to 2nd and 3rd rate thinkers, perhaps in the future we can pay substantial amount of money to the 1st rate thinkers via new technology. Traditionally the university system was the priesthood of the accumulated secular knowledge of mankind. More and more, however, that middle man priesthood is not needed. I think a Reformation might be in order :sharebeer
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by epilnk »

As a scientist, at times I feel almost in despair over the devaluing of the liberal arts and the current overemphasis on "STEM" fields. What is the value of an education? And why have we strayed so far away from truly educating our children? Is the goal to raise up a nation of semi-literate lab techs capable of performing repetitive assays without spilling hazardous chemicals?

Real scientists need education, not training. I can teach them to measure and pour and operate equipment, but I can't teach them to think. I used to manage a small research group in biotech; I did much of the recruiting and hiring, and we took a lot of kids fresh from college. The diligent A students with a resume filled with specialized biology classes were usually capable enough, in a limited sort of way. My most talented assistant had a masters in biology but had majored in literature in college. The geology major who came to us from the army turned out to be a superstar once he learned how cells and DNA and stuff worked. I tried to get the philosophy major too but alas, he was snatched up by another research team. I ended up hiring mostly diligent biology majors because that was the bulk of the applicant pool, but a major in biotechnology would have ended up at the bottom of the B-list pile.
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by coldav »

I think today's student is looking for financial security when choosing a major; thus, the rush into STEM degrees. I would assume the liberal arts degree has lost some favorability that it had in the 1960's. Instead of exploration of the mind, society, and world, young people are thinking pocket book which is undertandable considering the cost of living compared to yesteryears.
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by Calm Man »

I do not know what OP means. If he/she means graduating from a liberal arts college, well most have sciences too. If he/she means a degree in the non-science areas like sociology, African American studies, history, English literature, etc, that is different. I went to a selective but not Ivy league liberal arts and sciences college. In fact, I think they called it "The College of Arts and Sciences". I ended up majoring in chemistry but I liked and took a lot of courses. These have remained with me forever and I now read more than ever before and very rarely is it science. I did notice a few things at that young age which might be incorrect. FIrst, if you were one of the top students in any major, you were real good. But if you were a weak student, you couldn't do the math and science-type majors and gravitated towards the others. Second, it occurred to me "what are these people going to do for a living that USES their majors?" I figured it would be to teach it to others. As I have gone along in life I have come to realize that I and people like me, who know the sciences, can read anything we want and communicate about it, be it art, music, literature, etc. Many of us read an awful lot. Those who do not know science or math cannot do that. Having said all that, there is no better way. People's abilities and interests differ. When I am asked (I do some interviewing and counseling for the college)about which way to go I say that if you can handle the sciences then major in one of them. If you like other things too, that's even better, and either double major (as my daughter did - Neurochemistry and Chinese, unbelievably) or minor in a humanity.
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by etm »

Luckily when I attended shcool my university had a very small core curriculum. So once that was out of the way it was amazing to take many courses in chemistry, English, religion, philosphy and math. My major was accounting. The best course I ever took was a two semester class about the Supreme Court. There's nothing like spending a year reading the major decisions. It's something every citizen should experience.
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by Peter Foley »

For a summary report of a comprehensive survey of fairly recent college graduates, one can Read the Rutgers University report regarding Chasing American Dreams. The reports provides details regarding the economic impact of graduating from college during the most recent recession.
The link below is to a summary report.
http://www.heldrich.rutgers.edu/sites/d ... elease.pdf
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by maroon »

The great value of a liberal arts education is that it teaches critical thinking skills. I think a liberal arts major can pursue a career in just about any field.
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by bogleenigma »

maroon wrote:The great value of a liberal arts education is that it teaches critical thinking skills. I think a liberal arts major can pursue a career in just about any field.
Perhaps, more importantly, can they make enough money to eat?
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by William4u »

mdpsychcrnp wrote:
maroon wrote:The great value of a liberal arts education is that it teaches critical thinking skills. I think a liberal arts major can pursue a career in just about any field.
Perhaps, more importantly, can they make enough money to eat?
Yes. According to the WSJ, some liberal arts majors (e.g., Philosophy majors) make more money at mid-career than Business, Chemistry, Biology, Accounting, Marketing, and Architecture majors.

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/ ... -sort.html
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Re: What's the Current Estimate of the Liberal Arts?

Post by Dave76 »

Calm Man wrote: As I have gone along in life I have come to realize that I and people like me, who know the sciences, can read anything we want and communicate about it, be it art, music, literature, etc. Many of us read an awful lot.
This is only true for older generations. The literary pursuits of today's natural science students are Scientific American, Playboy, Newsweek, popular journalism, junk novels from ephemeral authors, TV Guide, etc. They, like the students of the human sciences, are not burdened with the questions and concerns of theology and ancient philosophy. Plato's Meno and Augustine's City of God have nothing to say to them, as far they're concered. They see both wisdom (e.g. Pilgrim's Progress) and garbage (e.g. The Five People You Meet in Heaven) and cannot tell them apart.
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