And there are many chances over four years for students to actually engage in challenges that test and develop their character. At this challenging moment in our society and world, it would be easy to despair. But I do not. I am optimistic because I know the power of competence, community and character. The liberal arts matter now more than ever. Contact us at letters time. Bowdoin College. By Clayton Rose. TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture.
Student engagement is expected and questions are encouraged. Exposure to cool things — Students are constantly exposed to interesting ideas, creative concepts and new experiences. 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.
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.
Financial Aid Opportunities — Liberal arts colleges often have generous financial aid options available for students. 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. 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.
Because the best schools know that liberal arts students are prepared to think, create, connect and come up with original solutions.
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. Many colleges and universities that embrace liberal education suffer from a certain degree of self-satisfaction. We know our graduates do well in their lives and careers. We celebrate that within our own communities.
We need to better explain what liberal education is. We need to better articulate what we do -- and why it is so important for our country and the world.
The mission of most liberal arts colleges is to educate the whole person rather than training graduates to succeed at specific jobs. Liberal education does that by teaching students to become lifelong learners who are their own best teachers.
It enables them to take intellectual risks and to think laterally -- to understand how the humanities, the arts and the sciences inform, enrich and affect one another. By connecting diverse ideas and themes across the academic disciplines, liberal arts students learn to better reason and analyze, and express their creativity and their ideas.
College should do more than get you one job. It should prepare you to succeed in multiple careers. Studies show that current college graduates will likely change careers a dozen times in their lives -- and do so before turning If all they learned in college was how to do one thing well, navigating those changes is going to be tough.
Successful careers and financial gain are just part of the value of a liberal arts education. Its true worth is measured not in dollars but in meaningful lives well lived. Through the years, the breadth, depth, flexibility and rigor of American liberal arts education has enriched countless lives in myriad ways.
It has also produced many leaders in virtually every field of human endeavor. Other countries are now embracing the liberal arts in a bid to create employees who are not rigid technocrats but more flexible and innovative thinkers. Is it for everyone? Of course not. But for those who pursue liberal arts education, it can be life transforming.
I see this life-transforming potential across all types of colleges and universities. Some people might consider Pace University an unusual next step for someone who spent a decade as president of a small, semi-rural school in a Midwestern state.
Another factor is demand by students and their parents. T his raises the question: Why have liberal education in the modern world at all? Defending liberal education against the excesses of professionalism in elite schools, then, is a priority.
Not necessarily. As we have seen, the demands of liberal education and professional education were balanced for a few generations by universities that made an undergraduate degree a requirement for professional education.
Indeed, that was the course chosen by the nation that gave us the research university. While most German secondary students today receive an education that is tilted toward the vocational, the elite high school, or gymnasium, has long served as the equivalent of the American liberal arts college. At a time when many universities are forced to provide remedial instruction to high school graduates, the idea of a quality basic liberal arts education in high school may seem utopian.
But consider the social benefits. At many schools, for example, law degrees were undergraduate degrees. Suppose that this trend had continued. Reforms like these can be debated. View the discussion thread. Skip to main content. Wilson Quarterly.
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