Carolyn Gregoire

The Liberal Arts Major: Would you like fries with that?

The engineering major asks, "How does it work?"

 

The accounting major asks, "How much does it cost?"

 

The liberal arts major asks, "Would you like fries with that?"

 

Yea, yea… Not so fast.

Wherever we speak across the country, we're asked by parents how to find out about outcomes for graduates. They want to know how they can justify a Classics or English or Art major when STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields are a sure thing with sizable salaries. And if you only read the headlines in the New York Times and other fashionable news outlets, you'd think that the liberal arts degree was experiencing death by a thousand cuts. One recent headline: "There's no place for the liberal arts in the job market."

Writing in the Wall Street Journal last year, Jane Shaw opined: “Many liberal-arts graduates, even from the best schools, aren’t getting jobs in large part because they didn’t learn much in school. They can’t write or speak well or intelligently analyze what they read.”

So what can you do with THAT degree?