A liberal arts degree is worth much more than realised

We are all too familiar with the recession of 2008 and its subsequent impact on the decline of the humanities and more generally, the liberal arts, in North America and Europe.

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In the context of the ‘existential crisis’ facing classic liberal arts programmes, questions have often centred on their relevance and whether they offer tangible ‘real-world’ skills, resulting in a diverse range of outstanding career outcomes. An article in The New Yorker, The end of the English major, published in 2023 argued that traditional liberal arts study has become the ‘quaint province of a privileged elite, comprising students who do not expect a return on their investment and can afford to spend time on unremunerative pursuits’.

The ‘getting a job’ concernAs a result, liberal arts degrees face increasing criticism in policy discussions for failing to equip students with the knowledge and the skills valued in the labour market, often leading to inadequate financial returns on their educational investments. Given the discursive link between higher education and job prospects, domain-specific experts and counsellors advise aspiring high school graduates to pursue degrees in business, finance and economics, in order to secure jobs. The statistics are striking: in 1966, 14% of all college graduates in the United States were majors in the humanities (central to the liberal arts); by 2010, that figure dropped by half to only 7%. The discourse is not simply limited to the low likelihood of finding jobs after a liberal arts degree, but also suggests that associated majors are concerned only with abstract ideas. This might have something to do with the context within which liberal arts emerged in early modern Europe, as a means of avoiding manual labour or working with hands. A liberal arts education that combined humanities with science was thought to produce a ‘thinking’ individual. In many ways, the idea of a liberal arts education seems antithetical to expectations of regional development that involves some technical training and knowledge. Despite its beginning, liberal arts have evolved in practice to be so much more.