What Good is a Liberal Arts Degree?
What Good is a Liberal Arts Degree?
Liberal Arts encompasses a broad area of study, which includes the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Humanities is the study of the human experience from the perspective of philosophy, history, literature, languages, music, theatre and art. The Humanities explore the values, ideas and ideals of humanity in order to create thoughtful and responsible citizens of the world.
Social Sciences uses scientific methods to analyze, evaluate and understand human behaviour, society and cultural patterns. The social sciences include the fields of anthropology, commerce, criminology, economics, geography, political studies, psychology, sociology and women’s studies.
It is this combination and the generality of a BA degree that make it so useful. “The value [of it] is that it’s preparing [students] for any career”, says Jennifer Floren, CEO of a college recruiting service. Once [students] begin to think of the Arts degree in terms of acquiring broad, transferable skills, as opposed to specific techniques and knowledge, its merits become more apparent.
An Arts degree is not a vocational one, so its graduates must do more work to prepare for the job search, says Gregg Blachford, Director of the McGill Career and Placement Centre. “If you’re in engineering or management, you’re being streamlined,” he says. For arts graduates, career paths are less obvious. “A lot of arts students are just not aware of the nature of work out there,” Blachford adds.
“ . . . [students] have to make what [they] want out of it.”
McGill’s Dean of Arts, Christopher Manfredi, believes that the Bachelor of Arts is a valuable degree because it allows students depth in their discipline, breadth of education and “because of the skills it teaches . . . in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, ability to write and its broad exposure to questions of the human condition.” For the university student, beginning adult life from the general perspective that an Arts degree provides choice, and moving slowly toward a more specialized focus after graduation, is much easier than beginning with something very specific (say, neurobiology) and trying to expand your focus later. The freedom to learn from several disciplines within the Faculty of Arts allows students to explore many academic paths to help them with this decision.
The liberal arts approach is making a comeback in Canada after years of focus on technical skills, needed to support the once-burgeoning high-tech sector. As the technological boom has begun to even out, the demand for employees with a broader mindset has resurfaced in the job market to manage the infrastructure and creative thinking behind modern innovation. In a January 2001 report, 30 top executives of major Canadian high-tech corporations released a joint statement citing a “strong need for those with a broader background who can work in tandem with technical specialists, helping create and manage a corporate environment.”
The post-secondary education system in Canada is also shifting slightly to provide more liberal arts opportunities. For example, McGill’s freshman Arts Legacy program that is a year-long interdisciplinary approach emphasizing rhetorical skills such as how to think critically and communicate effectively. BA graduates are actually highly employable in the corporate world. “The CEOs of the world are mostly arts students,” says Blachford. According to a recent statistical analysis conducted by Dr. Robert C. Allen of the University of British Columbia, 50 to 81 per cent of arts graduates are employed in a professional or managerial capacity, which compared favourable with those in commerce, at 60 per cent. Manfredi believes this favourable statistic exists because “employers are looking for smart people who easily adapt to new situations.” In fact, he suggest, “someone with an arts degree may be better at those things than someone with a more specialized degree.”
The merits of the broad arts program are resonating now with other faculties that are now shifting towards a multidisciplinary approach in their programs. “I think there is a recognition in the fact that we have created the Bachelor of Arts and Science degree, that people who are in science need exposure to arts and vice versa,” says Manfredi.
Exposure to diverse courses and disciplines gives the graduate with a BA the invaluable skill of adaptability. According to Manfredi, “I think it makes one a better citizen [and] a better human being, and I think the most important thing is that it gives one a degree of adaptability, which in a rapidly changing world, is absolutely crucial.”
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