Personal & Intellectual Benefits
Getting a Job, Making a Difference, Making a Life.
Liberal arts graduates report remarkably high rates of satisfaction, happiness, and meaning in their lives.
Voa News. "97% of students who study abroad are likely to be employed within 12 months of graduation, according to a study at the University of California-Merced, compared with 49% of the population overall." Students who study abroad are more likely to find a job following graduation and are more likely to benefit from a higher average salary than those who did not study abroad in their undergraduate careers. Additionally, there are much broader benefits for society. Generally, going abroad encourages individuals to experience other cultures and to communicate with those different from ourselves. In turn, individuals are forced to confront their misunderstanding of those that are different, helping all live alongside each other peacefully.
Medium.com. A very common position in companies that develop technology-related products, product managers are like mini-CEOs, overseeing the research, design, and launching of new products. A product manager must therefore understand products just as well as people in order to develop the best product or service possible. Anthropologists have a unique set of skills and knowledge that allows them to successfully manage the entire process of developing and launching an innovative product. Anthropologists have the ability to holistically understand consumers and their own employees, enabling them to make well-informed organizational and product-related decisions.
Quartz. “It worries me that so many of the builders of technology today are people like me; people haven’t spent anywhere near enough time thinking about these larger questions of what it is that we are building, and what the implications are for the world.”
The Wall Street Journal. Indoctrinating students isn’t the same as teaching them. Homer and Shakespeare have much to tell us about how to think and how to live.
The Washington Post. A broad general education helps foster critical thinking and creativity. Technology alone is not enough - it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing."
Time Magazine. Philosophy and the humanities are not merely handmaidens of job-training courses, however useful they may be in that role; they are at the core of what makes education – and life – valuable.
The Economist. Business leaders would benefit from studying great writers.
The Fresno Bee. A broad liberal arts education teaches us to think. Good thinking is essential for citizens of a free, self-governing democracy.
The New York Times. “technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing."
The Hoya. "A liberal arts degree offers the wide-ranging skillset necessary to thrive in this oncoming and unpredictable new age of tech development."
Bloomberg. Summary of dialogue between Cornel West and Robert P. George emphasizing the threat of a purely-economic valuation of education and the meaning of the liberal arts.
Inc. "Liberal arts graduates are agile thinkers: They have learned how to think, not what to think."
The New York Times. Former Secretary of the Treasury describes how a degree in philosophy helped him navigate Wall Street and Washington.
WAMU, American University Radio. "So, what’s the purpose of liberal arts colleges today? Are they changing to meet the needs of a 21st-century student?"
The Hechinger Report. “A liberal arts degree provides skills and assets that make uncertainty something that can be embraced.”
EAB. "These in-demand skills teach help students build a strong moral foundation."