Yes, Employers Do Value Liberal Arts Degrees<\/a>,\u201d citing a study by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, highlighted that \u201cemployers overwhelmingly endorse broad learning and cross-cutting skills as the best preparation for long-term career success.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cAn arts and sciences education emphasizes skills that matter a lot in this world: being able to convey your ideas thoughtfully and clearly, being able to understand different ways of knowing and doing, relating the present to the past and learning from it and then being able to work toward the future,\u201d says Sclaroff. \u201cIt\u2019s ideal. It\u2019s multipurpose. It offers agility.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s liberal arts and sciences curriculum differs from yesterday\u2019s and the curriculum of tomorrow will be different yet again, reshaped to the needs of a future society. Faculty members spoke with arts&sciences<\/em> about the value\u2014and the future\u2014of the liberal arts and sciences education.<\/p>\nMalika Jeffries-EL<\/h2>\nAssociate Professor of Chemistry and Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences<\/h3>\n
If we have learned anything from the previous 50 years, it is to expect the unexpected. Thus, we must consider that today\u2019s students need to be prepared to solve tomorrow\u2019s problems. As a scientist, I learned fundamental chemistry that was decades, and even centuries, old. Nonetheless, it provided me with the skills to develop novel materials that were not even imagined by the early chemist.<\/p>\n
![\"Two](\"\/cas\/files\/2022\/11\/Boston-SpotArt-3b.jpg\")
As a graduate of a liberal arts institution [Wellesley College], I fully appreciate the benefits of developing a broad knowledge base before specializing in one major. Exposure to fields like history, literature, language, sociology, and political science is useful in helping students shape their views.<\/p>\n
A liberal arts education provides the foundation for thought and creativity needed to tackle new issues. Many of the current grand challenges in society will require scholars to work in an interdisciplinary fashion to solve them. Beyond technical fields, humanists and social scientists are also needed to help scientists develop technology that society will utilize. The world is becoming more complicated and more connected\u2014we need liberal arts education now more than ever.<\/p>\n
Saida Grundy<\/h2>\nAssistant Professor of Sociology and African American Studies and Director of Admissions<\/h3>\n
In sociology we understand higher education as an inequality issue. Not only does higher education have to meet the challenges of access in terms of who can get a college education in this country, but increasingly our field is studying how higher education itself creates inequalities in terms of wealth and income disparities. For example, Black students are no more likely to be gainfully employed than a white person with a high school diploma, and they are amongst the racial groups of students who incur the largest and longest-held debt from the cost of their education.<\/p>\n
A liberal arts education is like software that can be updated and adapted.<\/p>\n
Saida Grundy<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
When I think about liberal arts education, I am thinking about what helps to close these gaps. The labor economy is shifting. Globalization and automation have left us with a bifurcated labor market, where human beings either dominate the service sector\u2014which exploits low-income people of color\u2014and what we might call \u2018knowledge workers,\u2019 or management-sector workers, whose labor cannot yet be replaced by AI. Our students are going to be changing careers several times in their lives. Training them for a vocation<\/em> is planned obsoletion\u2014it puts them out of business when that line of work goes out of business. A liberal arts education is like software that can be updated and adapted. It allows them to create their own jobs and value.<\/p>\nAnthony Petro<\/h2>\nAssociate Professor of Religion and Women\u2019s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies<\/h3>\n
The most frequent comments I hear in my Religion, Health, and Medicine class start with \u2018I never thought about that.\u2019 For instance, \u2018I never thought about how a patient\u2019s religion might impact the medical care they want.\u2019 Or \u2018I never thought about how some hospitals have religious affiliations that shape what procedures doctors will or will not perform.\u2019<\/p>\n
Even if you do not think much about religion, it still shapes the lives of the people in your community and even your own life. Too often, we take a narrow view of \u2018what matters,\u2019 but the liberal arts help expand the horizons of our ethical, historical, and cultural imaginations. Religion matters to a lot of people. So does gender. And neither falls simply into one partisan camp or another.<\/p>\n
If you want to understand politics or culture, in the past or in the future, you need to learn something about how religions\u2014themselves internally diverse and ever changing\u2014shape our world. They give hope and incite violence; they inform debates over gender and sexuality but also battles over climate change, immigration, and healthcare. And not always in the ways we assume. The liberal arts help us to understand this larger picture.<\/p>\n
Arianne Chernock<\/h2>\nProfessor of History and Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Social Sciences<\/h3>\n
Speaking to the New York Times<\/em> recently, Columbia University history professor George Chauncey summed up the power of studying the past: \u2018Debates over who should be included in history are really often about who do we think should be included in American society today? Who should be respected in American society today?\u2019<\/p>\n![\"Woman](\"\/cas\/files\/2022\/11\/Boston-SpotArt-2-479x636.jpg\")
Chauncey\u2014who helped pioneer the field of queer history\u2014spoke from his experiences working in a once controversial subfield. But his point illuminates the larger value of studying history, and of pursuing a liberal arts education more generally. One thing we\u2019ve learned over the past few difficult years is that how we think about and represent the past has consequences.<\/p>\n
It would be impossible for our students to engage in meaningful conversations about race, class, gender, politics, or the environment without having some understanding of their complex histories, and of how different historical actors helped shape them. Recognizing that our world has been made, not found, moreover, can be an empowering act. Ideas and institutions are not fixed, but rather there to be made and remade and remade again.<\/p>\n
Suchi Gopal<\/h2>\nProfessor of Earth and Environment<\/h3>\n
We are at a defining moment in human history where we are confronted with climate change, posing challenges in sustaining the Earth\u2019s natural environment while at the same time impacting the well-being of the burgeoning human population.<\/p>\n
Over the last decade, Earth and environment departments have heeded this clarion call. They are increasingly providing a broad, integrated education that includes humanities and social and natural sciences. Several programs also focus on providing scientific skills and knowledge of specific subject matter (energy, climate, conservation) valued in the job market.<\/p>\n
The rise of data science involves monitoring and integrated analysis of the Earth and environment. Field and laboratory skills give a better understanding of our planet. For example, locating offshore wind requires an understanding of the ocean biodiversity, commercial fisheries, societal interests, and other factors.<\/p>\n
Liberal arts education in Earth and environment is providing the skills needed to tackle climate change, sustainability, globalization, environmental justice, disaster risk reduction, sustainability, and topics of societal needs in this changing world.<\/p>\n
James Uden<\/h2>\nProfessor and Chair of Classical Studies<\/h3>\n
Last year, we ran a series of events called Careers after Classics in which alumni returned to our department to chat with current students. Some reflections by an alumnus, now an attorney working in construction defect litigation, really stuck with me.<\/p>\n
Classics, he said, had taught him a variety of different things. First, reading and writing about Homer and Virgil taught him to construct a convincing argument. It also gave him a taste for reading difficult<\/em> things. Once you\u2019ve struggled your way through Thucydides\u2019 Greek, he quipped, legal contracts are a breeze.<\/p>\nMost importantly, classics had trained him to see complex issues from multiple perspectives. After all, studying the past exercises the imagination. You may think you have little in common with someone living in a very different era, who speaks a different language, who has different values\u2014and yet, in order to understand them, you have to think in their shoes. The humanities teach us the imaginative skills required to be more understanding, persuasive, and ultimately, humane.<\/p>\n
It was impossible for Romans to conceptualize the future without also looking to the past. That\u2019s why Janus\u2014their god of beginnings, and also of war and peace\u2014had two faces. The study of Greece and Rome continues to captivate an ever more diverse range of students, while reckoning with its own appropriation by elitist and racist forces throughout its history. It also continues to highlight the insights and achievements of the generations who found so much of value in the philosophy, art, and literature of the ancient world\u2014who looked, like Janus, to the past in order to understand the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Prospects are bright for adaptable, innovative students of the liberal arts and sciences<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":64258,"template":"","department":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/64255"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/r_cas_magazine"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/64255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64913,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-articles\/64255\/revisions\/64913"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"r_cas_department","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/department?post=64255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"College](\"\/cas\/files\/2022\/11\/cas-anniversary-future.png\")
For Stan Sclaroff<\/a>, there is no debating the value of a liberal arts and sciences education: It\u2019s built to survive. \u201cThere\u2019s this sense of continual reinvention,\u201d says the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences. \u201cWhatever the future may bring, you\u2019re ready for it.\u201d<\/p>\n