The Broadway musical Avenue Q includes a song titled “What Do You Do with a B.A. in English?” The song answers its own question with a comedic lament: “Four years of college / And plenty of knowledge / Have earned me this useless degree! / I can’t pay the bills yet / ‘Cause I have no skills yet.” While many college students may not know the song, they’re certainly singing along with its sentiment.
Enrollment has
dropped precipitously in the humanities
as well as other disciplines, including many in the social sciences. The Washington Post
recently covered
the move among rural colleges and universities to downsize or eliminate degree programs, partly from state budget cuts but also from declining numbers in those disciplines. Programs on the chopping block include English, history, political science, philosophy, theater, and even biology.
These changes make sense from an economic and employment perspective. Faced with depleting resources, educational institutions focus on supporting those programs with higher demand. Students with difficult financial prospects want a degree that will “pay the bills” because that education offers “skills” for the workforce. Yet these perspectives also show we have misunderstood important truths about education.
First, we’ve largely forgotten that the full purpose of education is to cultivate the entire person — a nourishment of the body, heart, and mind. It also includes preparation for living as a human, as a member of a community, and, finally, as a citizen in a political order. Reducing formal learning to the obtaining of job skills makes at least one of two false assumptions: Either one doesn’t need to learn how to live other than how to work a job, or society should really only value one’s contribution to a country’s gross domestic product.
Life is more than merely work. We must know what it means to live and to live well, whether through moral questions of right and wrong or aesthetic ones of recognizing and enjoying the beauty around us. We must know what it means to live together, including what we owe each other and how to fulfill such obligations to our neighbors. Finally, assuming our proper role as citizens requires comprehending what it means to be an American and that we know its history and its founding principles.
We pick up something on these matters by going about our day-to-day activities. But life often is hard, fast-paced, and tiring. We need time and space to contemplate and learn; education plays an integral role here.
Moreover, we have oversold technical training and undersold the liberal arts’ abilities to prepare students for jobs. The reality is that employers deeply desire employees who possess
“soft skills”
that don’t involve technical knowledge (such as how to code) but include the ability to communicate, work independently, and engage in analytical thinking.
Majors that emphasize job training can produce workers who know how to do narrow tasks but lack the ability to engage with bosses, coworkers, customers, and investors. Such people may understand how to do what always has been done but not consider how to do it better. Moreover, many men and women no longer stay in one career but move through several in their lifetimes. Job changes or simply advancements in technology can quickly make particular job skills obsolete.
Done correctly, an education in the humanities and social sciences offers skills that endure in relevance and last a lifetime. Good programs in philosophy, history, and political science seek to help students understand what it means to be human. In learning who we are and what we can (and should) be, students in such majors then learn how to create goods others want, provide services others need, and do so in the community of fellow workers.
As much as we can understand why such cuts in the humanities are happening, we should lament them. We can do better in our colleges and for our students. Education can and should be the means not just to a job but to flourishing life as a human, neighbor, and citizen.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.
