Liberal Arts vs. Specific education
Posted in General by jon h
I am just trying to break up the recent posting of george on overall utility and gas/cars.
This topic of liberal arts and specific (in my case, engineering) education has recently been a factor in my life…and I was wondering what everybody thought about this.
For my one of my GRE essays they asked me to comment on (choosing a side) the difference between a liberal arts education vs. specific education in college. At that point, being a W&M guy and considering my background of indecision, I was very much in favor of liberal arts education.
Looking back at the last couple months, it seems like the atmosphere in Williamsburg was very different than up here in Ithaca. I can’t say what the bro has experienced in Atlanta, but in Ithaca, the stress is always on jobs and applications usable in jobs.
That being said, I realized that I was ill prepared for “real life” coming right out of W&M, and I find that a lot of my friends are doing a similar path as me. Specifically, grad school…whether it be ed school, law school, engineering grad school. Are liberal arts schools like W&M just grad school breeding grounds?
One thing that was particularly evident was the difference in the impact of career services. At W&M career services were pretty much a joke, unless you were an accounting major or random business major. At Cornell, the career people are all over the place…I was hit with career stuff from the start, and our first career fair was 3 weeks into school. Perhaps, I wasn’t looking as hard at W&M, because I knew that I would have to do grad school to even believe I was ready for real world.
Is there enough emphasis at W&M for developing people for real jobs, or is it just a line that that they spew at every convocation or graduation “you are the leaders of tomorrow”?
If you want to continue on george’s path of utility and usefullness in society, what is the purpose of having a school that just readies you to be taught on the job? or need more schooling afterwards to refine skills?
April 25th, 2006 at 11:25 pm
Today it seems like college is all about teaching you how to think. I totally agree that college doesn’t prepare you for a job right off the bat.
Today it seems like you have to get a specialized degree to have any sort of “good” job, either that or be incredibly talented and a little lucky. I’m glad I’m getting a liberal arts education, simply because it’s opening my mind to a lot of possibilities. I think this is a very valuable foundation for whatever you tend to specialize in later.
April 26th, 2006 at 12:55 am
ok, so you have replied with the standard “college tour” reply. I think the liberal arts education was good for me because i had no idea what i wanted to do when i got to school. In contrast to your comment, it was good because I know a little bit more of what topics are irrelevant.
Mostly undergrad, and partially grad school has been an exercise in allocation of resources. I knew I only had a certain amount of time, and it was going to be wasted on math powered flight or 3d art. In grad school, I keep on having to argue with my group project mates with what to stop wasting time on…
April 26th, 2006 at 8:58 am
Ok, that’s true I did. I guess I’m glad because I went into school thinking I’d be a computer programmer coming out, and realized quickly that I couldn’t handle computer science courses.
April 26th, 2006 at 9:23 am
ha…you know, you probably got better grades than i did…:)
April 26th, 2006 at 11:15 am
I think most people in the Liberal Arts have very similiar experiences in that when their appreciation for their degree increases over time. A sort of upside down triangle if you will. A specific technical/semi-technical degree makes finding a job straight out of college much much easier. However, the skills you gain in a liberal arts degree are invaluable when you move up the work ladder. Basically both degrees have problems, but a technical degree allows one to get a foot in the door much easier.
At LSE everyone is locked into their degree program from when they applied to Uni. Everyone I talk to from first year to third year has already decided on a career path and is working towards it. Everyone wants to be an investment banker. If they are majoring in law then they want to be a lawyer for an investment banking firm. Its quite disgusting really.
Anyways having been to two career fairs I find economics to be a fairly nice middle ground between the two. Even though W&M’s econ department is shite.
April 26th, 2006 at 11:38 am
heck…everyone at cornell wants to be an investment banker…even some of the engineering people. I hope it is the case, that a more rounded education leads to greater results in the future. But realistically, I’ll have to find out what it is like as I go.
I agree somewhat about the W&M econ department, but it is also a result of the type of kid who goes into an econ major at w&m. Half of the kids are doing econ, because it is a safe, fairly straightforward major. You can go home and tell your parents and relatives you are an economics major…and everyone will say “oh thats good, thats applicable”. How many people go out of W&M and do economics? It would be interesting to find out. You have your George like Law school peeps, who won’t take the classes needed to get into a econ grad school, because they don’t have to.
It was amazing to me, how the econ department catered to the math averse. You can go from Econ 101 and have 300 kids in an auditorium and then have 5 undergrads in a time-series econometrics class. It is almost like they should have 2 majors, econ for prelaw and gov’t, and econ for those who want to know the ins and outs.
One guy I know, was thinking about econ grad school…talked to a prof (basu) and the prof told him that he didn’t have the necessary classes… not enough math econ. I guess my beef is: shouldn’t the requirements for a degree be oriented so that a major could continue study in grad school? I would bet that 75-80% of econ majors either wouldn’t or couldn’t go into econ grad school.
How is the london school of economics different? I’d be interested to know…
April 26th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
Now that I think of it, I don’t even know what’s required for econ grad school. I’ve taken a ton of econ courses, and both levels of calculus (but not multivariable), but no math after that. I bet it requires a bunch of math…
April 26th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
Jon,
That is exactly my problem with the Econ program at W&M. It caters to the Math averse. Stating that no calculus is needed for a course should not be a selling point. If the program does not prepare you to take graduate level courses then the program is a failure.
I like the idea of a dual track Econ degree.
Interesting aside: Last summer for my internship with a defense contractor we had to write a really long proposal. A lot of the writing for it was done by engineers and my boss had me look over some of it and look out for “typos and the such”. The writing was horrendous. I took it back to my boss with red marks through huge portions of it. I ended up revising quite a bit of their work even though I was a lowly intern. I can thank my liberal arts degree for that.
April 26th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
A liberal arts education produces well-rounded, adaptable human beings. The modern economy moves quickly, and many students end up in jobs that have nothing to do with their majors. Knowing a little bit of everything helps people adapt.
Beyond that bit of brochure wisdom, I would say that a liberal arts education is useful socially insofar as it gives students time to explore their interests and develop focus. This is especially important when “childhood” is considered by a majority of Americans to stretch into the mid-20s. As much as I find that statistic ridiculous, most eighteen year olds are not prepared to begin training for a career. And since the graduate school is becoming the norm rather than the exception, can’t we have both?
April 26th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
Beiter’s right graduate school is the new undergrad. i.e. college degrees are common place and graduate degrees can provide the specific skills need to put you ahead.
Jon, I didn’t see your little sentence at the bottom about how LSE is different. I am by no stretch a fan of the UK system. However, they place a very high focus on math when teaching economics. Much of what I saw from people taking intro to micro was stuff we were taught at the intermediate level. Everything they do assumes a good understanding of calculus.
In fact I was very limited in my course selection here because W&M had not provided the mathematical foundation necessary. Some of this was my fault in my course selection at W&M and some was that they just didn’t offer the neccessary preperation. I hang out some with another econ major from W&M and she also feels that W&M econ classes are just not challenging in the necessary ways. When in intro to micro we are supposed to find CS by finding the area under the curve and they don’t have us take the integral of the demand function that is just absurd.
Anyways. Do you think that Cornell is more intense in terms of finding a job and everything like that because it is an ivy league school or because its an engineering school or because its a graduate school? Or is it some combination of all three?
April 26th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Not that I am in a position to know exactly what happens at Georgia Tech, since I do theoretical stuff, but at engineering schools there is a big push to get Co-ops or do work with industry while you are at school.
For example, seniors here have to do a Senior Design project, which is basically a project specifically for a company (maybe Schneider Transportation). I can’t imagine that this hurts students chances for jobs after finishing school.
While I agree that most engineers stink at writing, I don’t think that going to a liberal arts college will cure you of that problem. Seriously, I took as little writing courses as possible and a degree can be finished with mostly Computer Science and Math courses. However, I already know how to write “good.”
April 26th, 2006 at 4:09 pm
For grad school for Econ, Engineering, and the Sciences, additional math knowledge may or may not be needed (Linear Algebra, maybe Multivariable Calculus). A lot of computations can be done in Excel (actually that’s what the businesses use too)
However, Ph.Ds in these subjects must have a solid foundation in these classes AND theoretical proof based Math classes (a lot of the engineers in my program have to take those class in addition to their Ph.D. curriculum). This is probably why there are less Americans in these programs, b/c they took “Math Powered Flight” in their liberal arts school.
Of course, I favor Math as a subject, so my impressions are a little biased. And undergrads who can’t add without calculators should be kicked out of school. I just grimace when Econ or Comp Sci students refuse to do math.
April 26th, 2006 at 10:37 pm
to mike, about the atmosphere of “jobs” at Cornell.
In comparison to w&m, the job fairs at w&m were a couple rooms in the second floor in the UC. it was a fair mix of stuff, some consulting firms looking for accountants, some random research groups, some volunteer groups.
The cornell career fairs were essentially two days of filling william and mary hall. First day was “general”, and the second was “technology”. Really exciting. I guess it is somewhat understandable seeing that they have 10-15k students.
Not that I had any luck with those career fairs.
The next wave of career stuff was on campus interviews…i went to probably 10-15 of those… none of those really panned out, but I got a nice free trip to DC to a 2nd rounder with Lockheed Martin.
The last and finally productive link was people coming to the department and interviewing straight through the department. This was what landed me my job.
April 27th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
It seems that many people that go into freshman year already know what they want to for their careers. I used to admire that, but in the majority of those cases the student is just kidding himself. If other students’ experiences were anything like mine then they had lots of interests going into college and no idea which one to pursue as a career. I’m glad I went to a liberal arts school. The primary purpose of college is to prepare you for the working world, but teacher people how to think for themselves and be conscious citizens might be the more important part of it. An education at a liberal arts school gives you knowledge about what is out there so that you can make an informed decision about a career. There are plenty of opportunities to get practical job experience at liberal arts schools. In the biology department, for instance, I will be doing research in a lab on campus next semester, and will be interning over the summer at a genetics place in Bethesda, MD.
April 28th, 2006 at 8:11 am
My father in his infinite wisdom used to say that education was not a way to become wealthy so much as something they can never take away from you.
Of course, her father wasn’t familiar with outsourcing and offshoring and has an immigrant’s view of education.
Unless one is open to the concept of education becoming irrelevant over constantly compressed periods of time they’re in for a rude shock. The quote is from a blog on wealth, but I found the comments to the blog more interesting than the actual blog entry.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathleen-reardon/the...
May 17th, 2006 at 1:29 am
Jon, you might want to read Mr. Pink’s book. You can hear him interviewed on Bob Brinker on Money Talk on demand.
This is almost the exact topic he covers.
May 17th, 2006 at 7:43 am
can you give me more information on this book?
a quick amazon search found a “Mr. Pink” who has written a Free Agent Nation, etc… This guy?
May 17th, 2006 at 7:50 am
oh…just saw your other post…i got it…