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Liberal Arts: good for the soul, bad for the rent.Apr 06 '00 Write an essay on this topic.I just finished a tour of duty as a disaffected liberal arts graduate. I never thought it could happed to me. It can happen to you, too! Graduating from high school in 1994, I went into college confident in an English major. I believed in the classical well-rounded Renaissance education. And when I got there, professors further reinforced my delusion by telling me how employers would value a worldly thinker, and that they would be willing to train such a person. THEY LIED TO ME In fact, employers aren't much interested in your ability to think, most of them want mindless automatons. I managed to find a job in radio, not because of my five years of college and high school radio experience, but because of sheer nepotism. In this bureaucratic era, you even need a two-year degree in library science to become a librarian. Nobody has spent more time in a library than an English grad. Is there a need for this degree of specialization? For goodness sake, at least take a minor that has some specific use. I don't say that with any pleasure; I actually say it as a bow to the marketplace. My minors were in philosophy and political science. That's right, almost completely useless. The most important goal of education is certainly the passing of knowledge and thought from one generation to the next. I'm told that even thirty or forty years people who understood Truth with a capital "T" were actually valued members of society. I wouldn't know. After departing from my news announcer job (which involved much dishonesty on the part of my employer), I spent the aforementioned time in Disaffection. There are certain advantages to being a frustrated English grad: 1) You can explain the social significance of Falstaff in Henry IV, parts 1 and 2. 2) You've got lots of time to catch up with The Beverly Hillbillies. 3) You're finally able to loiter around in the coffee shop as long as you want to. However, there is also the one major drawback: 1) You can't pay your rent. Luckily, I managed to avoid that major drawback. But if you become a liberal arts major (English, History, Language, etc), make sure you have a somewhat specific direction. I left school with no direction but grad school, which turned out to be a waste of time and money. More vocational majors, like business, criminal justice, or nursing, have it easy. They not only know what they want to do, but have a faculty support structure that knows how to direct them. Don't ever think your History guidance counselor is going to have a long list of options for you to discuss with him. BUT WHAT TO DO? I would definitely recommend the liberal arts if you have some sort of family business or connections you can fall back on. The classically trained have a dramatic advantage over the narrowly trained once they are hired. More importantly, liberal arts training makes you a fuller person. It's sad that so much of our society has turned its back on such knowledge. After much searching, I was lucky enough to land a job in the publishing world as an editor. My search wouldn't have been so hard had I taken something that would accompany English well, like a minor in computer science (I'm actually thinking of getting a Masters in it, if I can). With that computer science, finding an editing job would have been much easier. THE POINT IS . . . I can't recommend that you take a vocational major, I really feel some of you who have in interest in liberal arts would be cheating yourselves. And if you do plan on taking a really useful, marketable major, balance it off with some enriching classics.  |
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