LIBERALARTSONLINE

LiberalArtsOnline is an occasional electronic publication of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts about assessment in liberal arts education. We invite you to subscribe and to submit an essay. Past issues are available in the archives.

LiberalArtsOnline Volume 8, Number 1
May 2008

What Admission Officers Know (and Faculty Need to Know) about Public Perceptions of Liberal Arts Colleges
by Paul Marthers
Dean of Admission
Reed College

Who in higher education has not heard a liberal arts education get derided as a degree program that produces the well-read unemployed or underemployed? Liberal arts majors are fodder for many clichéd jokes that stress, and often exaggerate, the supposed economic advantages of majors in business and engineering. Certainly there are fast food cashiers, coffee shop wait staff, copy clerks, and parking attendants with liberal arts degrees—not essential to get or do those jobs. Certainly the economy is not always welcoming to classics, English, and philosophy majors seeking entry-level employment. Liberal arts graduates thus bear the extra responsibility of fulfilling the words of legendary University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins, who annually told entering freshmen that a liberal arts education would not prepare them to do anything in particular, but would prepare them to learn how to do anything they wanted.  Read more.

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