How Important is a Liberal Arts Education?

by George Lorenzo

In the many years (over a decade and more than 1,000 interviews) I have been writing about higher education, there are a good number of issues that come up repeatedly and seem to never really get resolved. One is in the workforce development arena where the emphasis is on identifying the challenges and issues community colleges and corporations face to effectively communicate
with each other to collaboratively produce cost-effective training programs that have meaningful learning outcomes. 

Some of the discussions around this issue go like this:  Community college faculty members are not fully aware of what they must teach in order to meet the needs of companies. Or, companies are too focused on having their employees learn only technical skills, and they are not fully cognizant of, or willing to pay for, the importance of having their employees take non-technical liberal arts or general education courses .

In a conversation I had with a veteran workforce development professional in the community college sector, it was explained to me that, generally speaking, providing employees with support for liberal arts courses is often only given a kind of lip-service by companies. In other words, companies won’t come out and say liberal arts courses are unimportant, but they also won’t provide adequate tuition reimbursement for such courses.

An opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, that made a convincing anti-funding-of-  liberal-arts-education argument and generated a good deal of intelligent comments, emphasized that education spending should be much more focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and European-style apprenticeship programs and less on liberal arts (see “Tuning In to Dropping Out,” by Alex Tabarrok at http://chronicle.com/article/Tuning-In-to-Dropping-Out/130967/).   In what can be considered a controversial statement that rankled some of the commentators, the author wrote that “graduates in the arts, psychology, and journalism are less likely to create the kinds of innovations that drive economic growth.”  

In another related piece – this one a short broadcast by National Public Radio in January of this year – Clay Masters from Harvest Public Media talks with the CIO of ConAgra who says that their IT department “is recruiting more employees off the beaten path,” e.g., students with liberal arts degrees.  A representative from the Association of American Colleges and Universities named Siemens and Hewlett Packard as companies with similar recruitment practices. I have to say that as
a journalist myself, I found this refreshing to hear (see “Liberal Arts Degrees: An Asset At Some Companies,” at  http://www.npr.org/2012/01/16/145309326/liberal-arts-degrees-an-asset-at-some-companies).

So what do you think? Do companies place a high enough value on liberal arts education? Do you think it is beneficial for companies to reimburse tuition for a Psychology, Philosophy, Art, History and/or English Composition 101 course, for example? I know many companies support employees in their pursuit of full associate and bachelor degree programs that include general ed/liberal arts-required courses, but how much worth and/or innovation do you think these courses bring to a company’s bottom line?