A problem with Liberal Arts

Everyone does not have same expectations. Some people want to become multimillionaires, some people want to be presidents and prime ministers, some people want to do social service, while most people want to do whatever the heck jobs their degrees will get them.

It is very confusing with liberal arts grads. They take a wide variety of courses—a semester in Greek poetry, another in the workings of a nuclear fission reactor, and yet another in the labor relations in post-perestroika soviet republics that have embrace democratic forms of governance. This makes them think they could be poets, nuclear scientists, sociologists, or whatever they want to be—they would only have to fill the form, and impress the interviewers with their wide world-view and their diverse knowledge in almost every topic that could popup during a conversation. Unfortunately, things do not work out like that.

Don’t get me wrong—I am really very interested in getting a liberal arts degree. But I understand a liberal arts degree cannot really compete with pre-professional degrees in technical lines, non-technical lines, and other lines. The only places libarts degree works are social organizations, government agencies, and dictatorial regimes that want trained foreign manpower working for them, but cannot find anyone from pre-professional schools willing to work.

People think liberal arts colleges are so great because they see a few people hitting it big, and attribute it to their liberal arts education. A friend has a brother who did his post-grad in Harvard, interned for a year at CERN, and is now researching in theoretical physics at Cornell. And he was a LibArts major. This sounds great, but not at much, when you also find out that a lot of his classmates at the same liberal arts college did not go to a field they wanted to, but instead took whatever jobs they were offered first, and inertially followed up in the same field.

The problem with liberal arts education is that there are so many possibilities and opportunities that it is too easy to take the first good offer you are given, and then become stuck with the job, or the field because you don’t want to, or you feel you cannot anymore.

Go LibArts!