Why choose Liberal Arts & Humanities as a career

“Its technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing” – Steve Jobs

“What will my child do with a liberal arts education?” is a question I am asked at least every other day by concerned parents interested in the Liberal Arts and Humanities programme. My emotive response would be to smack my forehead in resignation on the banality of the question. My rational response is to try and explain to these parents that a liberal arts program is not a professional degree – and that’s not a bad thing.

To tackle the question of, “what can a student do with a liberal arts education?” we must first delve into why this question even exists? (To admit my biases in responding to this question, I am a foreigner in India and have lived in the country for only one year. Worse than these failings, my grasp of any Indian language is atrocious, thus I can only speak from a paucity of experiences!)

My biases being freely admitted, everyone whom I talk to in India states that other degrees are more applicable. Degrees such as engineering, business, or medicine make sure that the child will find some work.

It remains however that these degrees are often problematic. It seems that the average engineering graduate is no better able to solve a practical problem the day they leave school than the day they first joined college. Rote learning has become the standard of the day. So while a student can easily solve and indeed quote various equations and their use, they cannot creatively design a new method for implementing these theorems.

Worse than that, they often overlook the practicality of their work. For example, what is the point of providing wells to a village if the water table is too saline? Or the point of building a factory that has 3 times the production capacity that will ever be needed? These are pertinent questions that need to be asked, yet the majority of Indian engineers are unprepared to tackle these quandaries.

The point for a liberal artist is always to demand, why? It is the ability to be interrogative, to not just accept the status quo of any particular belief.

This demanding human quality is built up, not through memorization but through broad learning. Liberal artists take a diverse set of courses, from psychology to philosophy, from English literature to mathematics. It is through the experience of reading vastly different texts across a wide range of topics that questioning and seeing broader connections becomes second nature. What does history and sociology lend to each other? What can Machiavelli’s The Prince tell us about state organization? These types of questions foster broader learning, showing the different lenses and connections this education provides.

Thus the answer to “what can a student do with a liberal arts education?” is not determined by what they know but what they are able to learn. A liberal arts student is only limited by their desires which are often as vast and interesting as their studies.

Some liberal artists I know work in investment banking, as research associates for various universities, work for or start their own NGOs, or have begun careers as theater directors. None of them specifically majored for these fields yet they are all well equipped to work and thrive in their employment.

Several well known, and highly regarded, individuals studied the liberal arts. Ted Turner being one of the more notable examples; his father wrote a scathing letter to him when he elected to study a liberal arts major. “I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted Classics as a major…I think you are rapidly becoming a jackass, and the sooner you get out of the filthy atmosphere, the better it will suit me.” Ted Turner would later go on to found CNN, now a global television network. His net worth is estimated at $2 billion.

The reason for a liberal artist’s success is their passion, not just for what they study but also for what they do. Steve Jobs, who quit college, but followed independent education (including calligraphy) epitomized this belief. “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle.”

This quotation summarizes the life of a liberal artist; how they find nontraditional work, and often create it. They look for their passions and strive towards them. If they discover their passions lie elsewhere, they have the skills to segue into another profession.

So how does a liberal arts education map onto a career in business or a company? That is something only a student can decide, however others have clearly worked out situations to their benefits.

I had the good fortune to meet a former medieval historian, running part of the study abroad programme at my undergraduate university. While she loved history, she found working with students, scheduling their travels and the logistics behind them, more rewarding. When I inquired how her skill set had adapted to this line of work, she wryly stated, “Anyone who can read all of Summa Theologica in the original Latin can certainly work out how to plan a trip to France.”

The same held true for work in NGOs. An acquaintance of mine received their Master’s from the University of Chicago in the social sciences, studying medieval French poetry. While she graduated with this esoteric degree, she found work in a Chicago NGO promoting the sale of fresh fruits and vegetables in the poorest parts of the city. She compared her skills in learning medieval French to having the capacity to learn more or less anything. She found that her desire to help others drove her to learn more than she ever expected, past just her interest in medieval poetry. It will be important for some to know that she developed skills in gathering and analyzing data along with basic software programming while working for this NGO. It proved that just because a “soft” science is studied doesn’t mean any student cannot develop skills to practice the “harder” sciences.

I myself have had what I thought to be a linear path of development, however I now see that my passions lie in multiple fields. Originally, I started my undergraduate degree with the explicit idea of becoming a college history professor. I didn’t consider that I would ever want to do something practical with my studies. However, in my Masters I began to see the possibility of working with a more pragmatic eye towards influencing policy in the world. Now having worked with pure academics and others who mix academic pursuits with their desire for social change, I have committed to following a non linear path towards scholasticism. I seek the opportunity to both focus on the theoretical aspects of my studies and aspire to work for substantive change in the real world. Through these ideas I have started to volunteer part of my time with an NGO in India working against sex trafficking and have altered my research towards contemporary issues regarding gender violence.

Thus, I believe that a liberal arts education is the capacity to do what you love no matter how that changes across life. Most importantly, it is the opportunity to constantly shape your own idea of success.

About the author:

Cameron Paxton is a Senior Research Associate and Programme Coordinator at OP Jindal Global University in the School of Liberal Arts and Humanities. He received his BA from Michigan State University and his Masters from the University of Chicago.