College Liberal Arts Degree Needs a Makeover

The college major called Liberal Arts is in dire need of a makeover, a new marketing campaign to promote an updated image. It's a shame that many people believe a liberal arts major has limited job prospects upon graduation. Businesses would rather have new hires with specialized technical training to fill entry level positions. People who can hit the ground running, they say, like engineers, programmers, hotel managers, nurses, lab technicians. Liberal Arts majors bear the brunt of so many "can't find a job" jokes; they even joke about it themselves! They just can't get no respect!  How sad it would be to have such a low self-image after investing so much work and money in a college education.

Many products and concepts have been successfully repackaged for consumption by the American population just by renaming them. Political activists and advertising copywriters have been doing this forever. How did tasteless diet food in undersized portions become "Lean Cuisine?" Take a cue from the women's rights movement. A women's studies major offered at many universities could have been called feminism, but the word had too many negative associations. But women's studies has a positive connotation.

It's a matter of word selection.

First, look at the name Liberal Arts. LIBERAL means free or generous. In our linguistic wiring, FREE somehow gets hooked up with EASY . An engineering student has to master really difficult subjects like physics and calculus. A liberal arts student takes English and history. Subconsciously, people think it can't be that hard, studying English. In my opinion this is a false assumption.

The second word problem: ARTS. One thing my father (an engineer) really didn't want us to pursue as a college major was art. In his mind, art wasn't practical. ARTIST is associated with STARVING, so I can understand why many people feel art will not be the best route to making a decent living. No parent wants their kid to end up like Van Gogh, right? Never mind that there are thousands of people in the fields of art, design, animation, music, etc. that are using their amazing talents to grace our world with beauty.

Suggestions for a liberal arts name change would have to take into account the current buzzwords that people respond to. Words like GLOBAL or INTEGRATED strike the right chord. How about Global Foundational Studies? Crossfunctional Analytics? Integrated Studies? Anything that sounds more cutting edge and modern than liberal arts is bound to work.

Colleges and universities are falling all over themselves to keep up with the educational and vocational demands of students. They're offering more specialized courses of study in hopes of attracting good students with the funds to pay for the sky high tuition they're charging. These programs are meant to keep America competitive in the new global economy, to train our young people to go out and get a fulfilling, high paying job and start contributing to society. In fact, they need that high paying job just to pay off their student loans!

Some of the new majors have interesting titles -- service science, health informatics (is that a word?), sustainability (ecological/green engineering), entrepreneurialism, and homeland security. I actually can't figure out what "service science" means. All worthy topics to study, but do we need such highly specialized programs, especially in an era where young people will likely experience one or more career changes in their lifetimes? A graduate still has to learn the job on the job. The qualified statistics or information technology major should be able to apply his skill set to "health care informatics" without having to specialize in the health care industry. Just because an field is hot now doesn't mean it will be 10 or 20 years from now. Which brings me back to liberal arts.

A specialized degree trains a person how to do something specific. For many, it's an appropriate option. But a liberal arts education is a classical education, it's about teaching a person how to think logically and critically. Their knowledge may be more generalized, but liberal arts majors should be able to solve problems and apply their education in a variety of shifting work and life situations. A liberal arts graduate is qualified for a myriad of jobs, including management, sales, communications, media, to name a few. And I don't think that reading, writing, and communicating in proper English (or other languages) should ever go out of style.

When a soldier starts out, he or she goes through basic training. Most people have great respect for anyone that has made it through such a tough regimen. The training equips the soldier to handle the extreme situations they will find themselves in. Employers greatly value this ability, and many military veterans can make the transition to a civilian position once they retire from service.

Liberal arts should be thought of like basic training. The goal of a new marketing campaign for liberal arts, after a name change, should be to get people to think of it with the same kind of respect and admiration. A person prepared for just about anything...that's the kind of image to promote. A liberal arts major should be able to claim it proudly without having to apologize for it.