Originating from Latin liberalis "free" and ars "art” or principled practice is the traditional academic course in Western higher education. Liberal arts uses the term art in the sense of a learned skill rather than specifically the fine arts. It’s a broad term encompassing majors from languages to economics.
A liberal arts education teaches students to process information and think analytically. This develops the ability to think across disciplines, serving as a crucial life skill. Students are introduced to new ideas, concepts, and unique experiences. With a liberal arts degree, students can choose many different careers such as journalism, public relations, writing, law, politics, linguistics, publishing, social work, psychology, management, public policy, civil services, marketing etc and flourish at it.
Interdisciplinary approach to learning
A liberal arts education intentionally integrates different areas of study, exposing students to a wide range of subjects. Business majors will also have classes in the arts, while economics majors may get a taste of sociology. This broad education prepares students to succeed in whatever career they choose. People that can view things from multiple perspectives, regardless of their own field, provide greater value to employers.
Teaches critical and innovative thinking skills
If you like the idea of an open-ended education without limits, you’ll appreciate the opportunity to explore your interests, satisfy your curiosity, solve complex problems, and spark your creativity through a liberal arts program. Rather than teach a technical skill or the latest programming language, liberal arts classes typically provide understanding of how a particular approach or activity impacts both the individual and the collective. Through intentional experience and exposure, liberal arts colleges provide students with crucial problem-solving and critical thinking skills. They focus on how to think, not what to think. Instead of memorizing facts and then forgetting the information at the end of the semester, students learn to examine, think, and connect ideas. These valuable skills, practiced and reiterated throughout the entire college experience, are the skills necessary to innovate and create meaningful change in the world.
Learn to be Creative
Liberal arts help students hone their abilities and add a creative touch to whatever task they perform. Possessing a solid command of skills like communication, comprehension, cultural understanding, and analytical inquiry make graduates appealing candidates to prospective employers. It is not surprising that many liberal art graduates go on to pursue higher degrees in business or in law.
Learn to think Different
As you grow and evolve, you may find that you want to change your career. A great benefit of a liberal arts degree is that you can translate what you’ve studied into different areas. Any major within the liberal arts will help you develop critical thinking, research, and communication skills. These capabilities are in high demand from employers, who often find these assets difficult to teach, and more valuable in the long-term, helping to protect liberal arts majors from changing economic conditions, ensuring ongoing demand and an implied measure of job security.
Learn Empathy
A liberal arts education teaches students how to empathize with other people. Science students are trained to see the bigger picture while liberal arts students also learn the importance of the human perspective. They see the effect their decisions would have on the people around them and the importance of communication. A large part of a Liberal Arts program is dedicated to improving a student’s communication skills through papers, presentations, and critiques.
Understand the Human Experience
A fascinating educational approach that has evolved over hundreds of years, a liberal arts education allows students to explore a variety of academic areas, from sciences to economics to philosophy to literature and to develop interdisciplinary insight into the human experience from multiple perspectives. Liberal arts opens the students' eyes to the world around them, and how certain actions affect others.
By studying Liberal Arts students learn how to take calculated risks and to think laterally i.e. to understand how the humanities, the arts and the sciences inform, enrich and affect one another. By connecting diverse ideas and themes across academic disciplines, liberal-arts students learn to better reason and analyze, and to express their creativity and their ideas. They are capable of thinking and acting globally and locally. A liberal arts education teaches skills to help people work together, communicate, and solve problems.
Parents are often concerned about the future job prospects and employability of their child if she were to choose a subject outside of engineering or medicine. It may come as a surprise that almost 30% of the CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies have a liberal arts degree. Famous and highly respected business leaders like Howard Schultz (Starbucks), Andrea Jung (Avon Cosmetics), Michael
Eisner (Walt Disney Company) and Carly Fiorina (Hewlett Packard) are just some examples of successful professionals that majored in liberal arts.
In the times of Chat GPT (or evolving AI in general), learning how to solve problems, flexibility, creativity, understanding multiple perspectives, collaboration and communication are key skills. For the reasons enumerated in this article, we feel that the relevance of a liberal arts education will continue to be high in the future.
