Is Majoring in Liberal Arts a Mistake for Students

The Value of a Liberal Arts Education

From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, from nationwide surveys to iconic CEOs, employers say they want to rent grads who tin can think critically, communicate clearly and solve complex issues.

They agree these skills, provided by a liberal arts education, matter more than what students choose as their undergraduate major.

Learn more at www.liberalartspower.org, or check out the executives' opinions and studies below.

How These Humanities Graduates are Finding Jobs in Silicon Valley
The Future of Work series explores why students with "soft skills" are disquisitional for innovating and helping organizations run finer.
Author Makes Case for "Surprising Power" of Liberal Arts Education
In his volumeYou Can Do Anything, George Anders explains the remarkable power of a liberal arts teaching – and the ways it can open up the door to thousands of cutting-edge jobs every calendar week.
Business organisation Insider: Hedge Fund Director Reveals Why He Loves Hiring Liberal Arts Majors
"Students of history and literature are more trained to understand the existence of multiple perspectives and to appoint with them, and and then can frequently more accurately sympathize the man dynamics that drive stock market place flows," said Daniel Rasmussen, founder of Verdad Fund Advisors. This is why he exclusively hires liberal arts majors for his undergraduate internship program.
Liberal Arts Education Can Lead to Career Success
Knoxville News Spotter:Co-ordinate to the Department of Labor, professionals will have more than x jobs before they are twoscore years old. So success is more than merely getting a job; it's having the tools to build a lasting career over a lifetime. Regardless of their major, liberal arts graduates have the various skill prepare that today's employers seek.
Scientific American: Stalk Education Is Vital—But Non at the Expense of the Humanities
The demand to teach both music theory and string theory is a necessity for the U.S. economy to keep as the preeminent leader in technological innovation... Apple's Steve Jobs once declared: "It's in Apple's Dna that technology solitary is not enough—that it's engineering science married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields united states of america the result that makes our hearts sing."
Wall Street Periodical:Why I Was Wrong About Liberal Arts Majors
Wall Street JournalPocket-size Business Skillful David Kalt says his experience has proven a liberal arts educational activity produces the sharpest, all-time-performing software developers and technology leaders: "A critical thinker is a self-learning machine."
The Atlantic:Why America'south Business organization Majors Are in Desperate Demand of a Liberal Arts Education
Students are clamoring for degrees that volition help them secure jobs in a shifting economic system, but to succeed in the long term, they'll crave an education that allows them to grow, accommodate, and to build successful careers: They need a liberal arts foundation.
U.S. News University Directory: Study Links Liberal Arts to Success in Life
A study released this year showed adults with a liberal arts background had a 30-100% increased run a risk of having positions of leadership. It also found a college likelihood of satisfaction and happiness among those who as undergraduates discussed issues with those who disagreed with them and had in-class discussions on varied viewpoints – all hallmarks of a liberal arts education.
Volition a Liberal Arts Education Pay Off?
College graduates earn $ane million more over their lifetimes than those with just a high school diploma. And in its first-ever college ranking, The Economist named Illinois Wesleyan graduates as top earners – with $54,600 median annual earnings compared to the average college graduate's $42,751.
University Parent: Now (still) hiring: Job prospects for liberal arts majors
Liberal arts programs readily develop core competencies that leaders in the high-tech work force most desire.
The Washington Post: Plenty with trashing the liberal arts. End beingness stupid
For years now, business organisation leaders have been maxim loudly that the skills learned in liberal arts education are exactly what they are looking for in employees.
Forbes: Why Tech'due south Nigh Valuable Teacher Is A Classics Major
Business savvy was folded into a liberal arts education for Tim O'Reilly, who has built a formidable training institution for software engineers. "More than broadly, all it takes is a quick scan through the job ads to run into how useful a liberal-arts pedagogy tin exist — even in our tech-hungry society."
Fast Company: Why Elevation Tech CEOs Want Employees With Liberal Arts Degrees
The liberal arts train students to synthesize multiple perspectives, to think differently about bigger questions, to translate complex information into clear language – and to adapt to irresolute circumstances, tech CEOs say.
Forbes: That 'Useless' Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech's Hottest Ticket
Software companies are discovering that liberal arts thinking makes them stronger. Merely ask philosophy major Stewart Butterfield, cofounder and CEO of Slack Technologies. And he's far from solitary, every bit Forbes reports.
What Yous've Been Told Almost Picking a Higher Major is Probably Wrong
Skillful advice: "But pursue your passion. Employers prefer to rent people who accept controlling, organizational and planning, trouble-solving, writing and advice skills" – skills best learned in liberal arts programs. "Major in what interests you most and what you are best at." Also: There are "dramatic differences between the 'sticker price' and the tuition and fees families actually pay."
Washington Post: Tech companies are hiring more liberal arts majors than you think
Liberal arts graduates joined the ranks of tech companies at a faster clip in the by few years than their engineering and computer-science counterparts, co-ordinate an analysis past LinkedIn, which concluded, "These results reveal that the philosophy behind liberal arts, which encourages multifariousness of skills and flexible critical thinking, transfers to the workplace in various forms."
"Congrats Liberal Arts Majors, You're the Nigh Desirable Employees"
A star-studded panel of entrepreneurial leaders said liberal arts institutions produce graduates who bring the freshest ideas every bit employees.
Does Alma Mater Really Affair? Where MacArthur 'Genius' Fellows Went to College
Many factors explain why liberal arts colleges have produced a disproportionate share of MacArthur Fellows, valued as "self-directed original thinkers" who create groundbreaking work. Illinois Wesleyan boasts two MacArthur Fellows, 1982 grad and the first vocal creative person to win the award, 5-time Grammy winner Dawn Upshaw, and Chicago-based customs leader Juan Salgado '91.
The New York Times: Starving for Wisdom
The humanities enrich us, in wisdom, agreement, and our pocketbooks. "A wide liberal arts education is a fundamental pathway to success in the 21st-century economy.... The economical render to pure technical skills has flattened, and the highest return now goes to those who combine soft skills — excellence at communicating and working with people — with technical skills."
Washington Post:What the 'liberal' in 'liberal arts' actually means
Information technology's liberal, not every bit opposed to bourgeois, but every bit in free, in dissimilarity to imprisoned, constrained or subjugated. "A liberal education is designed to provide students with the knowledge and abilities to go successful, productive members of a gratis society."
Washington Postal service: Nosotros don't need more STEM majors. We need more Stalk majors with liberal arts training.
If American science, technology, engineering and math grads are going pb the world in innovation, so their science teaching cannot be divorced from the liberal arts.
Weighing the Cost of Public vs. Private Colleges
A loftier school guidance counselor advises families to wait past the sticker shock of individual schools and consider their more than generous financial help packages and the much greater likelihood of graduating inside four years.
I Will Rent Yous for Your "Useless" Degree, If...
In the interests of hiring managers who want their companies to thrive, how you think is more of import than what y'all know. A then-called "useless" caste can teach you to observe and understand patterns and be forrard thinking.
Fourth dimension: Critics of the Liberal Arts Are Wrong
Aye, scientific discipline and tech are important, but a congressional written report shows that employers prize a more broadly-based instruction that has taught them to write well, recollect critically, research creatively and communicate easily.
Forbes: Employees Who Stand Out
The ability to remember, to conceptualize and to come up with creative ideas separates tiptop performers in their careers, co-ordinate to CEO Steve Sadove. These traits are hallmarks of a liberal arts education.
More than a Major: What Employers Want
In a national survey, 80 pct of employers agree that – regardless of their major – all college students should learn broad cognition in the liberal arts and sciences.
Fast Visitor:Why Top Tech CEOs Want Employees With Liberal Arts Degrees
Tech CEOs beyond the country agree that liberal arts preparation – with its emphasis on inventiveness and critical thinking – is vital to the success of their business.
Business organization Insider: Why Every Tech Company Needs An English Major
A erstwhile Twitter and Google executive told The Wall Street Journal he was looking for good storytellers at his startup visitor – illustrating how businesses depend on "liberal arts-centric communicators."
When the Cost of College Stops Going Up
Hamilton Place Strategies set out to determine when the cost of a college instruction is no longer worth the investment. Their answer: not until the year 2086, if tuition reaches $181,000 per year. Up to that point, a college degree brings a solid return.
New York Times: Many of Wall Street's Top Executives Studied the Humanities
The co-chairman of Carlyle Group, a private equity house, said that the reasoning skills that come with a well-rounded education issue in higher-paying jobs over time.
Are the Liberal Arts Worth It?
A new report documents that liberal arts graduates reach higher earnings and enjoy long-term professional success.
In a "chArts & Sciences" infographic, Phi Beta Kappa has compiled quick stats to illustrate why America must conﬁrm the life-long value of a broad-based education, which expands opportunity and drives ingenuity and innovation.
CEO Advice: "Become a Liberal Arts Degree"
Edgar Chiliad. Bronfman, the sometime CEO of Seagram Company, Ltd., believes the piece of work place of the future requires adaptable minds. "At that place is nix that makes the heed more rubberband and expandable than discovering how the world works," he writes.
Poll: Employers Favor Those With Well-Rounded Pedagogy
A recent public poll found that American adults and employers favor graduates who can communicate and think critically and creatively, rather than receive narrow grooming and industry-specific skills. Also reported by Inside College Ed .
Why a Liberal Arts Education Creates Peachy Entrepreneurs
John Dearborn, president of venture evolution business firm JumpStart Inc., joins the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs in his view that great innovations spring from the liberal arts.
Numbers Don't Lie – A Cost/Value Analysis of a Liberal Arts Degree
Not simply is a liberal arts education not every bit expensive every bit news stories lead us to believe, but there may be no better investment in America today.
Employers Demand College Learning Levels, More than Liberal Educational activity Outcomes
In a survey deputed by the Clan of American Colleges & Universities, employers said today's workers demand a broader range of skills and knowledge.
Best Education Non Closely Tied to 1 Job
A rigorous education will ensure that students are prepared not just for their first jobs, but besides for their second jobs, and peculiarly for those kinds of jobs that practise not nevertheless exist.
Forbes: A Liberal Arts Degree Is More Valuable Than Learning Any Trade
The caput of a billion-dollar software company argues that the skills necessary to succeed today are best fostered in a liberal arts environment.
Forbes:Major in What You Enjoy Most and Do Best
It's truthful: Liberal arts graduates earn well above the median income, excel in their careers and find great satisfaction in them.
Christian Science Monitor: Why a liberal arts pedagogy is the best job training
Students today can easily find information. The challenge is making connections, dealing with complication.
The states Today: Liberal Arts Grads Better Prepared, More Satisfied
A national survey found that alumni of liberal arts colleges such as Illinois Wesleyan are better prepared for their careers and more satisfied with their education than graduates of other institutions.