Chapter 4. The Importance of the Liberal Arts and Sciences

This chapter offers a brief background and some thoughts on why the liberal arts and sciences, often abbreviated to the liberal arts, are so heavily criticized and denigrated. I also discuss why I believe a liberal arts and sciences major, especially those in the arts or humanities, will never result in a “useless” degree (see also Chapter 2). It is not that I think a liberal arts degree is better or best (well, maybe a little). It is that this type of degree needs defending. As I assert throughout the book, students should always have the opportunity to study what they love at a university, either a two-year or a four-year school, or a trade school. Why do I include this discussion here? Because I have seen a great deal of parental interference in students’ major selections in my school and it makes for unhappy, and sometimes unsuccessful, students.

I have never heard someone say, “Why would you major in business? What are you going to do with that?” Or, “What? Electrical engineering? That’s absurd!” Or, “Nursing? Really? I don’t even know what that is. How will you ever get a job?” What you hear far more frequently is “An art major? That is a waste of time and money.” Or “A German major? How will you ever get a job?”

In this vein, I remember visiting the house one of my relatives in New York when I was a teenager. They were showing us around and there was a nice piece of art on the wall. My father loved to collect art and pointed it out saying that he really liked it. He asked where it was from.

They replied, “Oh that piece? It’s by a local artist. It cost us $120,000.”

My father said “Wow, really?”

Their reply? “Our daughter did it; she was an art major and that’s how much her college education cost us.” Never mind that she was a happy and employed college graduate.

Negative responses, like those above, are always saved for majors like art, English, religious studies, archaeology, etc. and that is simply wrong. Why? Identifying some majors as “useless” minimizes the value of a college education, the discipline, and the acquisition of knowledge and critical thinking. Scholars have written extensively on this topic. Fareed Zakariah’s book In Defense of a Liberal Education¹ offers a great message. So does Michael Roth’s Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters² and George Anders You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a “Useless” Liberal Arts Education.³

Many families, including those with parents who are college educated and those not college-educated, do not fully understand how a college education and/or a liberal arts degree can help someone. Occasionally, people think it is a political statement—getting a “liberal arts” degree means you are a liberal or will become one. I often explain to parents at my summer orientation talk that there are no “conservative arts.” What, then, is the origin of the term “liberal arts”?

The History of the Liberal Arts

Much has been written on this topic, so I provide just a brief overview here. Again, note that here I use “the liberal arts” as shorthand for “the liberal arts and sciences.” Some colleges and universities split the arts and sciences into different schools. My university does not. Therefore, when I mention the liberal arts, I mean the sciences too.

The Trivium and the Quadrivium

Originally, the liberal arts were those areas that the ancient Greeks thought were most essential for success in life. The original seven liberal arts were taught in two groups called the trivium (translated as the place where three roads meet or the three ways) and the quadrivium (meaning the four ways). The trivium included grammar, logic, and rhetoric and the quadrivium included arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. The trivium was studied first.

Early on, many colleges required knowledge of Latin and/or Greek for admission. While some schools maintain a foreign or world language requirement, many do not. I know of no school that requires fluency in Greek and Latin, though some majors do. And when universities and colleges first opened, study was mostly limited to theology, medicine, or law. This is no longer the case. So what are the liberal arts today?

Definitions

In modern higher education, there is a lack of agreement on a definition of “the liberal arts.” The liberal arts were originally constructed as different from the servile arts—those areas that were more skill-based. Catharine Hill and Elizabeth Pisacreta⁴ point to Daniel Kleinman’s 2016 definition which states that a liberal arts education is “a broad integrated education that includes course work in the humanities, social sciences and sciences.” They also state it is not only about what is taught, but how it is taught.

Think of the many small liberal arts colleges that draw students every year. This category includes schools like Bowdoin College, Swarthmore College, Williams College, Wesleyan University, or Middlebury College. These institutions are different from large public institutions like Ohio State University, Penn State University, or Arizona State University, which also offer solid liberal arts programs.

According to the American Association of Colleges and Universities website,⁵ a liberal education is defined as follows:

“Liberal education is an approach to undergraduate education that promotes integration of learning across the curriculum and cocurriculum, and between academic and experiential learning, in order to develop specific learning outcomes that are essential for work, citizenship, and life.”⁶

This same website states that the key components of this degree are:

• • “Essential Learning Outcomes: a framework that defines the knowledge and skills required for success in work, citizenship, and life and that can be used to guide students’ cumulative progress through college.
  • High-Impact Practices: specific teaching and learning practices that have been widely tested and shown to be beneficial for all students, including and especially those from demographic groups historically underserved by higher education.
  • Signature Work: an inquiry-based exploration of a significant problem that the individual student identifies and defines, that is conducted over the course of at least one semester, and that involves substantial writing and reflection.
  • Authentic Assessment: an approach to learning outcomes assessment that uses rubrics to evaluate the work students produce across their diverse learning pathways and whose results inform efforts to promote student success.”⁷

I also tell families and students at my school that we have come a long way from only seven areas (the trivium and the quadrivium) to the over 70 majors, including concentrations, that we offer to students in the College of Arts & Sciences. To date, the College of Arts & Sciences at UVA has not gone down the professional path of offering majors like diet and nutrition, journalism, fashion design, hotel management, etc.⁸ We do, of course, have students who successfully pursue all these careers (and many more) after completing their more traditional liberal arts degree.

What About the Humanities?

In the past eight to 10 years, numerous articles have appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, Washington Post, Chronicle of Higher Education, and other publications, that debate and discuss the “fall” or the demise of the liberal arts and especially of the humanities. I find this trend disturbing because of the high value of the liberal arts and the humanities for the sake of the knowledge itself, life skills, and because of the misunderstanding that a humanities major will never lead to a job, which the data do not support. I cannot stress enough in this book that your major is not your career. Adding to this stress is the pressure placed on students to have a “useful major.” Glassman’s New York Times opinion piece notes the following:

“It’s called pre-professional pressure: a prevailing culture that convinces many of us that only careers in fields such as computer programming, finance and consulting, preferably at blue-chip firms like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey or big tech companies, can secure us worthwhile futures. It is an inescapable part of the current college experience, like tailgating or surviving on stale dining hall food. It not only steers our life choices; it also permeates daily life and negatively affects our mental health.”¹⁰

Much of this pressure comes from the desire on the part of the students and adults to make money, a lot of money. After graduation, many students are faced with crippling student loans that will take them decades to pay off. They want houses, families, and quality of life. But this comes at a price as Glassman also notes:

“But what is missing in this race to perceived economic safety is the emotional toll. The number of young adults ages 18 to 25 who have had at least one depressive episode has doubled from 2010 to 2020. Almost two-thirds of college students have reported feeling “overwhelming anxiety” within a given year, and experts have pointed to the cocktail of coursework, pressure to participate in extracurricular activities and concerns over choosing a career as causes.”¹¹

And the advice offered that I fully agree with?

“Take a deep breath. A kid’s first word doesn’t need to be “revenue” or his first language Java. It’s hard to not want the best for your children—and not to define it as them starting the next Amazon. But stop and think about what actually makes them happy and keeps them sane, not what you think will keep them safe.”¹²

When I see parents or guardians forcing a student into a program they do not like and do not particularly excel in, it makes me frustrated, sad, and angry—not only because of my personal experience, but because I care about students, and it pains me to see them unhappy and struggling.

What is the proof that a degree in humanities prepares students for the workforce? See, for example, an October 2023 article from US News & World Report entitled “Why Majoring in the Humanities Can Be a Great Career Move.”¹³ The article states:

“It turns out that your parents were wrong. English majors—and others in humanities fields often seen as even less “marketable,” like philosophy and film studies—can get great jobs right out of college.”¹⁴

Yet, as colleges and universities face budget issues, humanities departments are the first to be cut. This move is likely because the number of these kinds of majors is in decline at many schools and because these are the disciplines that are most often criticized for “leading nowhere”—certainly not to jobs. David Curry’s 2024 article, The Gutting of the Liberal Arts, notes,

“The American public has become convinced that the only justifiable purpose for higher education is to get people jobs (though it isn’t), and they are convinced that one can’t get a good-paying job with a degree in philosophy, art history, French, sculpture, or dance (though one can).”⁵

Curry goes on to discuss how the humanities are being “hollowed out.”¹⁶ He notes that SUNY Potsdam recently fired seven tenured faculty and discontinued 18 programs. More departments are so small that they no longer have any full-time faculty.¹⁷ For example, in September 2024, Stanford called together 23 members of the creative writing program to inform them that their current positions were terminated and they would receive only short-term contracts.¹⁸ The fate of the program is unclear.

I understand the concern that parents have when they pay for two or four years of a college education and their child is unemployed at graduation. However, they tend to blame the program or the major first when there may be other key factors at work. These obstacles include, for example, the job market, the salary the prospective employee wants, where the person is willing to live (or not live), as well as how a person interviews. The data show it is not the major. The article just mentioned above notes the following statistic.

One indicator, Payscale’s College Salary Report, ranks philosophy the 272nd highest-paying major out of 800 degrees listed; Business administration ranks 360th.¹⁹

Despite much evidence to the contrary,²⁰ the myth of the useless major continues with parents prohibiting their children from declaring the major they love.

One of my favorite articles is a May 2015 article from The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, “If students are smart, they’ll major in what they love.”²¹ The article’s author Cecilia Gaposchkin states, and I agree (as I said above), that many people equate the declaration of a major with a person’s life career choice and what they want to be.²² A major in English means… what? That you are an English teacher, professor, writer? No! It means, as it means for every major, that you can do whatever you want when you graduate.

Examples abound of successful people who are in careers that do not directly link to their major. I often played a game with students where they had to guess the major of some high achieving and famous people. Some know and guess correctly, some are way off, and others finally see that they should pick the most unrelated major. Gaposchkin gives some examples in her article and notes:

To assume a necessary link between particular courses of study and students’ career prospects is to limit their options, and in many cases, their capacity for discovery and intellectual growth. Dartmouth College, for example, has educated two U.S. treasury secretaries, yet neither of them majored in economics or government: Henry Paulson was an English major, and Timothy Geithner majored in Asian and Middle Eastern studies. Plenty of other Dartmouth alumni explode the perceived link between major and careers: Jake Tapper, CNN’s chief Washington correspondent, majored in history; Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who wrote and directed The Lego Movie and directed 21 Jump Street, majored in government and art history, respectively.²³

The UVA alumni website shares success stories of those who majored in the liberal arts²⁴; other schools have comparable sites. Review the Notable Alumni section²⁵ and you will see, for example, that UVA alumni have done quite well without a journalism major (e.g., Jamelle Bouie, Margaret Brennan, Katie Couric, John Dickerson, Brit Hume, Jenna Wortham). Why? Because, again, your major is not your career. A quick search of “famous people with a liberal arts degree” yields many more names such as these examples:

Stacey Abrams, Politician and Organizer: Interdisciplinary Studies
Connie Britton, Actor: Asian Studies
Kenneth Chenault, Former CEO of American Express: History
Ben Elbermann, Pinterest: Political Science
Andy Jassy, Amazon: Government
Jack Ma, Cofounder & CEO, Alibaba: English
Alexis Ohanian, Reddit: History
Jen Psaki, Former Press Secretary: English and Sociology
Elizabeth Warren, Senator from Massachusetts: Speech Pathology
Susan Wojcicki, CEO, YouTube: History and Economics
Whitney Wolfe, Founder & CEO, Bumble: International Studies

Some of the people listed above went on to get MBA degrees, which likely contributed to their success. And while there are others who never finished college and are successful (e.g., Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Mitchell Broderick, James Cameron, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg), I assert these people were lucky and that a college degree is something everyone should have access to.

One of my favorite parts from the Gaposchkin article reads as follows:

The irony, he [a political scientist at Dartmouth] added, “is that the seemingly practical majors aren’t practical. The government department doesn’t teach you how to get and keep power. The econ department doesn’t teach you how to make and maintain wealth. The computer-science department doesn’t teach you how to code the way Google needs its engineers to code. Each of these are taught as a liberal art.”²⁶

I do not know why this powerful myth continues. So, I will beg you here, for a multitude of reasons, let your child go and let them pick the major they love, or at least like! Break the pattern and dispel the myth!

While some data support the fact that the number of humanities majors is on the decline, an explanation is hard to come by. Some scholars argue that the decline aligns with the 2008 financial crisis.²⁷ A pair of articles in The Atlantic provide two points of view in the articles “The humanities are in crisis”²⁸ and “Actually, the humanities aren’t in crisis.”²⁹ What should one believe? As always, it all depends on what data you look at and how you analyze those data. Though these articles are both a bit dated, I find them to still be relevant.

The “in crisis” article by Benjamin Schmidt asserts that students are turning away from the humanities to majors they think will get them a job, or a better job. At my school, that includes new majors in business and data science, and a minor in real estate, that pull several hundred students away from the College of Arts & Sciences every year. At UVA, English and history are still among the top 10 largest majors, but their numbers have decreased from previous years. It is worth noting that this decline also impacts the social sciences. The “aren’t in crisis” article by Jordan Weissmann asserts that this debate is not new, and the humanities were in more peril in 1985.³⁰ The typical student has changed and the number of new programs, especially interdisciplinary programs, at many schools has grown (for example, area studies and global studies) so students have more options now than they did 10 or 20 years ago. And most recently, The Chronicle of Higher Education announced a virtual event for October 2, 2024 entitled Where the Humanities are Thriving. In the advertisement for the event, it stated:

“Yet, across the country, there are colleges where these departments are experiencing enrollment growth. Statistics around unemployment also show that the dire narrative around employment for these majors is just that, a narrative, as the unemployment rate for humanities majors is similar to other college graduates (around 3 percent). In other words, the humanities may simply have a marketing problem.”³¹

The humanities and social sciences provide essential knowledge and life skills and perhaps there is less of decline than previously thought. More importantly, if one wants to study English, philosophy, or archaeology, those options must remain available for the sake of knowledge. The skills acquired from every major, not the specific major, will improve a person’s success in the job search.

Regret

A recent statistic from Inside Higher Ed citing Dreambound³² stated that 44% (over 4 in 10) of US adults surveyed regret their major.³³ The survey highlights that the most common reason U.S. adults regret their choice of major is a stronger interest in another subject, with 56% of respondents citing this as their primary reason. This number saddens me but does not surprise me given the number of students I see who tell me they love one area of study but are majoring in another.

What did surprise me was the number of respondents who said they wished they studied computer science or business since the article also says that education and business majors were “most likely to regret their college major.”³⁴ Perhaps those who majored in business wish they did not and those who did not wish they did? The largest major at UVA is currently computer science, but I predict this will change as AI takes over and as the market is flooded with too many computer science majors. Businesses say they want “thinkers,” not just coders, so I think this trend will change in the next three to seven years. More importantly, my consistent message is “major in what you love (or at least like).” It does not have to be your career, in most cases it will not be, but you will do better in college, enjoy college more, and hopefully have fewer regrets later in life if you find a major you enjoy!

“Skills” From A Liberal Arts Major

Students can develop a wide range of valuable skills through any liberal arts or sciences major. Our role is to help them articulate these skills effectively during job interviews. For example, many employers state that any liberal arts major should offer the following “skills” to students:

• Critical thinking
• Research
• Writing
• Rhetoric
• Quantitative literacy
• Teamwork and Individual Work

While some majors may emphasize certain skills more than others, I believe every major in a liberal arts and sciences college offers opportunities to develop all these skills through a combination of general education requirements, electives, and courses within the major (and minor). A liberal arts degree gives students the ability to learn how to learn, which they need for a host of jobs that they might pursue in life. This degree also provides the potential to pivot to new careers if the opportunity arises. The odds are high that a student will not be in their first job out of college when they are 30, 40, or 60.

Students and their families often make the mistake of focusing on a major that is popular now or that they think will lead to a career in a field that is on the rise currently. However, what will happen 10, 20, or 30 years from graduation? What new skills will job seekers need to have to learn? Think of the jobs from the past that no longer exist such as:

• Ice Cutter
• Scribe
• Milkman
• Elevator operator
• Switchboard operator
• Film projectionist
• Word processor/typist
• Keypunch operator
• Video store clerk

While some of these jobs may not have required a college degree to do them, the key point is that the world is constantly changing and the liberal arts major can pivot as the economy and workplace changes.

It is predicted that by 2030 the jobs of travel agents, retail providers, real estate agents, and many administrative legal jobs will no longer exist. Some predictions state that many doctors will be replaced by AI and improved technology. Some argue that the importance of programmers will dwindle significantly as AI programs take over and learn to program faster and better than any human.³⁵ As stated above, the computer science major at UVA is currently the largest major with students often saying it is what they must major in if they want a job. However, UVA recently launched a new school—the School of Data Science—with both undergraduate majors and minors. It will be interesting to see if a shift occurs from majoring in computer science in the College of Arts & Sciences to a degree in Data Science from this new school. I believe it will happen rather quickly.

The fact is that jobs will exist in the not so distant future that do not exist now—jobs that we cannot yet imagine. An article on the website CareerAddict³⁶ lists 15 in-demand jobs that did not exist 15 years ago. The list includes:

• Driverless car engineer
• Social media influencer
• Blockchain analyst
• Podcast producer
• Telemedicine physician
• Cloud architect
• Uber / Lyft driver
• Drone operator
• Chief listening officer
• Budtender
• Big data scientist
• Contact tracer
• E-sports game coach
• Online dating profile writer
• TikTok marketer³⁷

Similarly, the website The World Economic Forum³⁸ lists the top 10 jobs of the future for 2030 and beyond.³⁹ It includes jobs like “Work from Home Facilitator”; “Algorithm Bias Auditor”; and “Cyber Calamity Forecaster.” Again, I believe it is the liberal arts major who is best positioned to pivot to new jobs that do not yet exist.

A recent research piece from Brookings titled “Don’t knock the economic value of majoring in the liberal arts” makes two key points:

• “According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Humanities Project, the share of humanities degrees out of all bachelor’s degrees peaked in 1967 at 17.2% and by 2018 had fallen to 4.4%.
• Earnings for all college graduates rise rapidly after graduation and continue to rise for decades. In contrast, the age-earnings profile of high school graduates is relatively flat.”⁴⁰

This first point illustrates the decline in humanities majors. The second confirms what most data tell us—that those with a college degree will earn more over their lifetimes than those who do not have one.

The parents of students who want to pursue a liberal arts degree, and especially a major in the humanities, need to let students go forward and forge their own path. Students and their adults need to understand the value of knowledge and the value of studying what one loves and enjoys. And I will again add that it needs to be easier and more affordable to get to college, to stay in college, and to complete a degree.

Below, are some key skills that one learns from every liberal arts degree. These things are learned elsewhere as well but, again, it is the liberal arts that need additional defending.

Innovation

Some people assume that all research and innovation rests in STEM fields. I am pro-STEM; I worked and taught (and still do) in a discipline (archaeology) that thinks of itself as a science. However, innovation can come from everywhere and anywhere, college education or not. You do not have to major in a traditional STEM field to be an innovator. MaryAnne Gobble, in her article “Innovation Needs the Liberal Arts,”⁴¹ summarizes the assumptions behind STEM funding:

“The end point of this line of thinking, which peaks around innovation indexes and national elections, is a relentless focus on producing more STEM graduates and a devaluation of liberal arts and social sciences. What use, to society or to the individual, is a degree in anthropology, or philosophy, or art history, politicians will ask as they channel ever more funding to STEM programs and slash funding for art and music in primary schools.”⁴²

Decreasing liberal arts funding is a huge problem. We most certainly have work to do in building STEM fields, especially around diversity and inclusion. However, in addition to forcing students into areas they do not enjoy and may not excel in, we diminish potential innovation that comes from other fields. Think of art, dance, drama, music, creative writing, poetry, and all the research done in other fields like anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and history. All of these fields contribute to innovative thinking in social and economic settings.

Creativity

It goes without saying that there is creativity within the liberal arts and sciences. One of Kurt Vonnegut’s oft-cited quotes reads:

“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.“⁴³

Creativity can be found everywhere—in every discipline. Our world and our societies need creativity to thrive, to survive, and to flourish. The liberal arts are a great source of creative and innovative ideas.

Of course STEM fields, like engineering, applied sciences, or architecture, lead to innovation and creativity too. The difference is that few people ever question whether majors in these fields possess these qualities. It is the humanities and social sciences that are more consistently criticized for being “useless” majors without much research into the long-term careers of people with these degrees.

Critical Thinking

The Foundation for Critical Thinking, which offers professional development, conferences, and research opportunities, suggests that critical thinking must include qualities like clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, and fairness.⁴⁴ Critical thinking is a skill that students sometimes lack, having mostly learned to take standardized tests in their high school years. However, critical thinking is essential to college, communication, and success in the workplace. Many students just want to “know what’s on the test” or ask, “What’s the right answer?” Faculty know that often there is no one “right” answer.

For several years, I regularly co-taught an advising seminar class with a colleague from biomedical engineering. This class focused on major technological innovations in prehistory and history. We talked about the first stone tools, the beginnings of agriculture, the origins of writing, the printing press, and his personal favorite—sanitary water systems. We agreed on much and disagreed on much as well. Sometimes we would debate and, although there were no tests in the course, at one point a student raised his hand and said, “Can you just tell us what the right answer is?” We laughed. We were both right. It was not a multiple-choice test with one right answer. This exchange illustrates perfectly to me the importance of learning how to pose research questions and of critical thinking to support your statements and responses.

It also shows the necessity to be familiar with scientific inquiry and the process by which hypotheses are formed and tested. More people need to understand how science works and how it evolves with new evidence.

Research

If you are a college student, the odds are high you will need to write a research paper of significant length at some point. While this task should happen in high school, in many cases it does not. I have had more than a few students tell me that the longest research paper they wrote in high school was two pages. When asked to write a five-page paper for the first time, many students are overwhelmed and do not even know where to start. In one of my senior seminar classes where students were required to write a research paper of at least 15 pages, we built in all the necessary steps with assignments such as the submission of a title and abstract, a draft outline, a draft of first part of paper, etc. One student wrote a fairly solid paper, but cited only one article. When we asked her about her other references, as we required more than one, her response was “the paper was already too long.” We had to explain that citing references appropriately did not make the paper longer and that it was required. We all wondered how she got through four years of college without knowing this.

Equally important is learning how to develop a research topic and pose a research question. In the same advising seminar class I mentioned above, we required a short paper to begin to expose students to the process. We told them we would critique their papers as if they were a senior thesis, but grade them like a first-year paper in a one-credit class. The first step was for students to submit their research proposal on a technological innovation.

Very few students came close to a viable topic on the first try. One student, for example, said her paper would be on the Nile River.

“What’s the research question?,” I asked.

Her response? “The Nile.”

“That’s not a question, it’s a place. And it’s not a technological innovation,” I replied.

She did not understand what we wanted. We met with her to explain the process of framing a research question. Another student proposed “the impact of television on culture.” Closer, but my response was, what kind of television, what culture, where and when?

“Oh,” he said; “I guess that is pretty broad.”

Research skills, from framing a question, conducting the research, and drawing conclusions to whatever the final product is (even if it is not in the form of a paper), are essential for any job. Learning how to ask a question, pose a question, propose hypotheses, and test them, etc. are key skills for life. It is unfortunate that some students finish college without those skills in hand.

Writing

Writing is something everyone will need to do well no matter what job they accept. Whatever career one has over their lifetime, they will need to write emails, summarize documents, draft proposals, etc. In some jobs, obviously, there is much more writing than in others. It is a skill that the majority of employers rank highest and they expect potential employees to have this skill. A 2020 survey conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) showed that “90% of employers viewed the ability to communicate through writing as either a ‘somewhat important’ or ‘very important’ skill.”⁴⁵ Most high schools have classes where students have to write papers, but that paper may be short, which makes the research papers assigned in college a shock. I consider a 5–10-page paper to be relatively short; some students view it as a dissertation. Some do not understand the process, the parts of a paper, and/or how to do the research. And while most colleges have writing classes (required or optional), those papers sometimes do not prepare students for the 20-page research paper they will need to do in their major. Most schools have help—either online advice for how to get started or writing centers where students can go for one-on-one help. See, for example, the following schools which are a somewhat random selection of large and small schools, public and private schools, and two-year and four-year schools.

Arizona State University
Brown University
Dartmouth College
Mesa Community College
MIT
Ohio State University
Piedmont Virginia Community College
University of Virginia

While writing help abounds at colleges, students must learn to access these writing centers and not the night before their 10-page paper is due. Students also need to realize that writing is not something that one ever stops learning; it requires a lifetime of always trying to improve (as wanted and as needed). College provides a wonderful start.

Summary

Several years ago, I received an email from a woman in her fifties who had graduated from UVA. She had, under pressure from her parents, gone on to medical school and incurred hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. More importantly, she described how unhappy she was with her life. She said she wanted to pursue her passion, which was philosophy, and asked if she could return to get a degree.

Like many schools, UVA does not permit a student to earn two undergraduate degrees. After struggling to find the right words to express my empathy for her situation, I responded that it was not possible for her to do this at UVA, but it would perhaps be possible elsewhere. I offered some suggestions such as perhaps starting with a free online course or an evening class at a local college and then thinking about earning enough credits in philosophy as a part-time student to be able to apply to a graduate program. It was disheartening to read her email, and I could not help but imagine myself in her shoes, running my father’s beauty salon business and regretting that I never studied archaeology. It is hard to know how that would have played out, but I do know I would not have been a good fit since it was something in which I had no interest. I also know that if that is how I spent the last few decades, I would have been miserable.

The faculty at most colleges and universities would cringe at the thought of reducing what they teach to a set of skills, myself included. We teach disciplinary content, and we are passionate about what we teach. We have devoted our lives to it. However, a student entering the work force from any major will bring creative thought, different ways of working and solving problems, and innovation to any job they take. We need diverse thinkers on every team: technical people, detail-oriented people, big idea/blue sky people, financial planners, “box checkers,” and so on. There are various tools that assess our strengths like Clifton Strengths Assessment, Emotional Intelligence Assessments, VIA Character Strengths Survey, and Working Genius. These evaluations allow employers to build varied teams. Some employers now administer these assessments to job candidates to help with their hiring decisions.

As you move on to Part II of this book and the next sections of examples, lessons learned, and advice, I urge you to consider what was said here. In sum: (1) there is no useless major; (2) your major is often not your career; and (3) critical thinking, writing, and research, in qualitative and quantitative realms, are essential skills which can be learned from any major. If you are a student, please major in what you love; if you are a parent, please let your child study what they love.