What Will You Do With That?

It’s an old saw, but in the form of a question. “Whatcha gonna do with that?” It is posed when a college student declares an interest majoring in some ‘liberal arts’ area. Images of burger-flipping or barista-tending come unbidden to the mind of the inquirer; perhaps also to the mind of the one being interrogated.

You Can Do Anything is the answer provided by George Anders’ latest book. The book’s subtitle is The Surprising Power of a “Useless” Liberal Arts Education. Part feel-good and part self-help, it is aimed well at students and recent graduates with majors in the humanities and social sciences who are not pursuing professional graduate education. (Perhaps also aimed at their worrying parents.) The book has four parts (“Your Strengths”, “Your Opportunities”, “Your Allies”, “Your Tool Kit”) and does what most articles do when defending a liberal arts education: Use anecdotal vignettes to tell an engaging story. Hearing uplifting narratives – sprinkled with appropriate tension, angst and drama – about recent graduates who take circuitous paths and eventually find their dreams along with ever increasing paychecks, provides a dose of validation, hope and encouragement.

Are these tales representative of what might transpire for most students who chose a major in the humanities and social sciences? Anders tries to pick a reasonably diverse spread of protagonists, although they do skew towards those who had the opportunity to attend “elite” liberal arts colleges. My alma mater is viewed positively through several interviews with recent graduates, so I’m glad at least a few of these students seem to be thriving. Also rather nebulous is how exactly those humanities and social science classes do that prepare one for a life of adaptability to the changing landscape of career opportunities. There is a sense that the open-endedness of questions wrestled with in such classes trains one to deal with complexity and uncertainty. There are also the usual references to critical thinking along with writing and oral communication skills. Pre-college backgrounds of the students weave themselves into the narrative, but then cloud the value of the liberal arts college education, since the inner drive, perseverance, curiosity, may well reside in the profilees regardless of their choice of major.

While there is just one tiny example of chemistry as a field being mentioned in opposition to the “liberal arts”, You Can Do Anything mainly contrasts the liberal arts with engineering, business, and other professional degrees. Like many other apologists for the liberal arts, STEM is mentioned as part of the Other. As a chemist, who went to a liberal arts college, I take issue with that characterization. The sciences, in my opinion, provide students the opportunity to wrestle with complexity, exercise critical thought, and communicate in writing and in speech, among other things. Are there science classes that resemble robotic information-spewing from instructor to student? Likely so, but I think they would be in the minority at liberal arts colleges – at least in chemistry departments, since I have many friends and colleagues who teach in such places. I think my students who are science majors get the best of both worlds, combining both the technical and the liberal arts.

A second book along the same vein, and also published in 2017, is A Practical Education by Randall Stross. This book’s subtitle is Why Liberal Arts Majors Make Great Employees. (The book cover is amusing, see above.) Stross has an interesting background. While he has written several books on Silicon Valley startups, his Ph.D. is in East Asian history and he is currently a professor of business at San Jose State University. His book also takes the vignette route but focuses only on Stanford students. Stross acknowledges the limitations of his work on page 2; that the students profiled mainly come from privileged and financially secure backgrounds, they are academically excellent, and are a competitive bunch.

Stross further qualifies: “I don’t make a blanket claim that every student, at every college or university, who elects a liberal arts major will, ipso facto, make an outstanding employee upon graduation by dint of enrolling in the courses and earning passing grades. But those students who do choose for a major an academic field that is not tightly connected with a particular career and who do well in those courses, who demonstrate a sponge-like capacity to absorb new knowledge, whose academic record shows drive and diligence and a capacity for thinking hard and communicating well, should be seen by prospective employers at the multicapable candidates they are.”

That’s a good summary of the main argument made by both Stross and Anders, and for that matter all other proponents of a liberal arts education at the college level. The authors also acknowledged the disconnect between what top-level CEOs say they want in employees (that jibe well with the qualities Stross mentions) and what actually happens at entry-level hiring. In a larger company, top-level CEOs aren’t doing the hiring – and middle managers who have responsibilities they need to fill are doing what they think they need to do to fill those positions, i.e., looking to fill a niche technical expertise. In a number of the vignettes, graduates find their opportunities at small start-up companies where you might not be hiring to fill a particular niche, but you need to cover multiple areas – so it matters less what previous technical skills you possess as long as you are a fast learner and both independent and adaptable. Interestingly though, having some tech skills helps greatly in getting one’s foot in the door. Thus many of the Stanford undergraduates profiled have a computer science class or two or three under their belts.

Two things make A Practical Education very different from You Can Do Anything. First, it does not have a strong self-help vibe. Second, and much more interesting, Stross weaves in a history of Stanford throughout the book (in almost alternating chapters). The book’s title stands out even more from this lens, because the idea behind the founding of Stanford was to focus more on a “practical” rather than “classical” education. The tensions between the founders, early presidents, faculty and students come alive in the interweaving narrative. Leland Stanford and David Starr Jordan, both strong personalities, have significant page time – and their stories are both interesting and relevant to the “liberal arts crisis” today. Lewis Terman, pioneer for the Stanford academic test for admission, makes his appearance midway; chapter 12 “A Mania For Testing” is an essential read in our assessment-laden culture today. I did not know about Raj Reddy and the Stanford 2025 retrospective, but the chapter on “A History of the Future” was fascinating; that subject requires its own blog post.

Coincidentally, I received both these books on the same day (in early October) that I read The Life Shaping Power of Higher Education by Martin Krislov in InsideHigherEd. I’ve read many of these articles before; maybe that’s why I found it bland and uninspiring, with its familiar anecdotes. But perhaps part of the problem is that in today’s unhealthy culture of emphasizing counting and measuring, and prizing the quantitative over the qualitative, we need to be reminded that not everything that counts can be counted. And not everything that can be counted counts. Krislov writes: “Successful careers and financial gain are just part of the value of a liberal arts education. Its true worth is measured not in dollars but in meaningful lives well lived.” The gospel being preached here is what? You can have your cake and eat it too? Krislov undercuts his own argument by going on to list the accomplishments of the institutions he has led almost exclusively in terms of numbers and counting. I was disappointed.

Much more sobering is a 2010 article by Howard Doughty in College Quarterly: Restructuring the Pleas for the Liberal Arts in an Age of Technology and Ascendancy. Here’s the abstract: “Education is many things, but it is primarily the mode of production and reproduction of socially sanctioned knowledge, including the technical skills and sustaining ideology needed to maintain cultural continuity while adapting to social change. To teach creatively and to explore and shape knowledge amidst vast technological changes is the test of contemporary educational success. Part of that test involves the protracted assault on the liberal arts in the presence of transformational information technology, an increasingly competitive global economy and the neoliberal market mentality. Liberal arts defenders have confronted disparaging critiques with three basic types of argument: autonomy (the liberal arts are inherently valuable); service (the liberal arts support vocational training); and complementarity (the liberal arts properly balance marketable skills).”

Doughty then proceeds to explain why the three defenses remain unconvincing, before giving you his approach by trying to scare you with a dystopian future. The last part of his abstract reads: “A fourth position is that humanity’s precarious position in dangerous times provides the liberal arts’ principal rationale: The liberal arts are essential for ecological sustainability, social survival, the future of our species.” He might be right about the future, but he might not. Even if he is right, it’s unclear that a liberal arts education would help turn the tide. Perhaps Krislov is closer to the mark when he remarks about the liberal arts: “Is it for everyone? Of course not. But for those who pursue liberal arts education, it can be life transforming.” And perhaps that is what Anders, Stross and others have shown in their books and articles. For some, certainly those profiled but many more whose stories are not publicly known, it can be life transforming.