A friend recently complained to me that the expectations of a liberal arts education and the demands of the real world go in two opposite directions. On the one hand, he said, students are expected to gain higher awareness of the human and natural worlds they inhabit. On the other, the real world asks for professional skills that students barely have. When they graduate, students from elite colleges find themselves stuck. They have high expectations for their future but few skills to survive.
My friend is not the only one worrying about liberal arts education. In his recent review of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's new book "Academically Adrift," Anthony Grafton quotes from the Collegiate Learning Assessment to show what has become of the university curriculum. The assessment reports that 45 percent of students — in a sample of 2,322 — had made no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing in the first two years of college. More depressingly, Grafton wrote, they found out that the vast number of students do not have a specific interest in their courses or how they might affect their future careers when they enter college.
Parents read pieces like this and worry about their kids as well as the tuition they have paid. They do not want us to become one of them, and neither do we. We all know how terrifying the job market is, and literature students like me make fun of our prospects of not finding a better job than making coffee at Starbucks. It's unlikely that I will ever become a world-renowned philosopher or novelist. So why bother pursuing a major in the humanities if it won't help me find a decent job?
Many people feel the same way. According to Focal Point, 195 seniors from the class of 2011 concentrated in economics, while another 133 pursued international relations. The Commerce, Organizations and Entrepreneurship program attracted 75 students. In comparison, seemingly less practical concentrations are less popular. The German studies department had only six concentrators.
Some economics lecture courses have also been extremely popular — some of them had more than 200 students enrolled in previous years. This year, after the department decided to cap some of those classes at 100 seats, students who were desperate to get in even formed a black market to trade for a spot ("Econ caps spur black market controversy," Sept. 12). It looks like the department failed to recognize how high the demand was.
Although I might be anxious about my future and career, at least I have been taking classes I like. More practical-oriented students sometimes complain that they are taking classes that do not really interest them. These two kinds of students are jealous of each other, and each struggles to achieve a balance between academic interest and practical need.
We are afraid of failing — failing to get a job, failing to live up to parents' expectations, failing to have a bright future. But we do not want to give in too easily to job mania either: It's just too cruel to believe that as human beings our fate consists of nothing more than being a little screw in a machine. We read Shakespeare and Homer because we want to know how those hugely important people in the history of mankind thought and how they still affect our lives. We have the desire to be connected to nature, the civilization we belong to and the history of our ancestors. Without such knowledge, we feel lost.
For those who are lucky enough to have found their passion, more money or higher social status will not make them significantly happier. College gives us a chance to find the dedication that will later distinguish us from everyone else. But it does not guarantee a good result. We all waste time in classes that we later find to be uninteresting. One may read a whole semester of Descartes and wonder if he or she really knows anything about the philosopher. Many of us graduate and still feel uncertain about the future. That's okay. It's not our fault, nor is it the liberal arts curriculum's. We are all still ignorant, and college is just the beginning of becoming wiser.
Even if it is assumed that career-minded courses and majors lead to better job performance and security, we will not easily abandon our passions. As college students, we are still young and brave enough to follow our hearts. The University offers us the luxury to learn whatever we want, get a bad grade, acknowledge our ignorance, make big or silly mistakes, struggle to balance both interest and need and risk failure.
Jan Cao '13 is a comparative literature and German studies concentrator. She can be reached at jieran_cao@brown.edu.
