Tag Archives: Habits of Mind

Life beyond the Liberal Arts Degree

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Life beyond the Liberal Arts Degree

Grafton and Grossman highlight that today many do question the value of a liberal arts education. Realistically we all know that the economic situation today is quite different than it was even a generation ago. Despite the ever changing job market, the level of skills, imparted to students within the humanities, enables them to remain competitive. Attaining a job today takes more than just a degree, it takes having connections and the ability to think critically about the best way to use these connections to your advantage. When you receive your degree from Dickinson, you have the backing of other alumni who are prepared to network and possibly open doors that would not be available to you on your own. They do this because they realize that you have benefited from the same high standards of academic integrity that they themselves received. Years of studying, researching, and analyzing topics have made you a critical thinker with the ability to think outside of the box. This happens to be an essential quality for any profession, imparting far more on you than just a piece of paper. This piece of paper stating your degree from your beloved college is the first step to getting an interview for your potential first job. The incite gained because of that piece of paper walks with you for your entire life because you have been trained to communicate not just what you desire to undertake today, but what you know you will be able to accomplish through strategies and discovering solutions to tomorrow’s problems.

A Liberal Art Education

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Walk into any Starbucks across the country, and you will encounter a highly educated college graduate whose degree in interpretative dance, Zulu, or what-have-you seems to translate into immediate hiring at any coffee shop, effective immediately after graduation. Unfortunately for millions of college students, a bachelors degree no longer guarantees a high paying position. Instead, highly intelligent graduates are stuck working multiple jobs as baristas and busboys in a never-ending race to pay back insurmountable student loans. It is not enough to simply graduate with a degree; instead, students need to be able to think, to question, to innovate, and do so better and more uniquely than any of their similarly educated peers. In other words, an impossible task. A critic of the current higher education system, William Deresiewicz, laments recent graduates’ inability to connect with the common man, and failure to gain a comprehensive understanding of the world. He claims students know “more and more about less and less,” decreasing their employability. ((Deresiewicz, William in “Habits of Mind: Why college students who do serious historical research become independent, analytical thinkers.” The American Scholar Winter 2015.)) However, the authors of “Habits of Mind,” Anthony Grafton and James Grossman, suggest students should be highly specialized, in order to switch from a “passive observer” to a “creator” and to become an independent, self-reliant thinker ((Grafton, Anthony and James Grossman. “Habits of Mind: Why college students who do serious historical research become independent, analytical thinkers.” The American Scholar Winter 2015.)). But liberal arts schools combine both views. Students are well-rounded and well-informed, while still specializing in an area that teaches them the skills that Grafton and Grossman revere; they possess the ability to hold conversations with plumbers and with highly educated colleagues in multiple languages. Grafton and Grossman seem to suggest that it is impossible to be both synoptic and analytic; however, every student that walks down the steps of Old West provide evidence to the contrary.