Want to help young people graduate into well-paying jobs and a lifetime of good citizenship? Across the country, colleges and universities are doing the opposite. Facing budget shortfalls and declining enrollments, schools – like SUNY Potsdam, Clarkson University, Warren Wilson College, Lesley University, and even West Virginia University – are slashing liberal arts programs to fund programs in STEM, business, social work, nursing, and the like.

This strategy will backfire and hurt both students and the country.

Let me explain.

First, an education lacking in the liberal arts hurts our students – as citizens and human beings. My students are acutely aware we face grave challenges: climate crises, pervasive poverty, threats to democracy, racial and gender discrimination, and much more. They know they’re entering a profoundly unfair world. To take their money and turn them into assembly-line tools for existing jobs while ignoring the harms they know are coming to them and their children is cynical and impractical. By failing to teach them our history, political landscape, and critical thinking about the world around them, we risk treating them as less than full human beings with their own concerns.

That’s what W.E.B. Du Bois’ warned in “The Souls of Black Folks” in 1903, saying whites wished Blacks “educated as a tool, as a means of serving and ministering to the White race.” True freedom, he argued, required Black individuals to be trained not just to fit in but to change the world. They needed the enlarging perspectives of a liberal arts education to enable them to reimagine and reshape the world.

Second, offering only educational programs with specialized professional tracks will hurt these students as workers and citizens. With technology’s advances and the climate changing our economic landscape, today’s specialized job skills will become obsolete. The next generation will need soft skills like problem-solving and critical thinking to adapt and stay employed. Researchers find that liberal arts education fosters cognitive empathy and complex problem solving (including analyzing the relationships among parts of an organization or challenge) – and gives individuals flexibility to navigate career changes in a volatile job market.

Studying history, political science, literature, and the like helps students develop skills that endure: navigating ambiguity, empathizing with diverse populations, and understanding flexible systems. Professional training is valuable – but less valuable when taught in isolation.

Here’s the larger problem: Many colleges and universities are cutting liberal arts courses to balance their budgets in an era of declining enrollments. Before cutting instructional quality, they should be tackling administrative bloat. According to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, from 2010 to 2018 “non-instructional spending – including student services (29%) and administration (19%) grew faster than instructional spending (17%).” Further, “colleges prioritized hiring less expensive and often less-credentialed instructional staff and more expensive administrative staff.” Higher education needs to invest in quality instruction.

And most state governments have been dramatically reducing investment in colleges and universities. Between 2008 and 2018, “on average states spent $1,220, or 13 percent, less per student.” More public investment in liberal arts would give us all a better economic future. According to economist Thomas Piketty, the United States was vastly more productive than the rest of what he called “the Western world” in the mid-twentieth century in considerable part because of massive investment in liberal arts higher education. The Harvard Business Review argues that liberal arts study is the best way to cultivate the skills employers find most valuable: “oral communication, critical thinking, ethical judgment, working effectively in teams, written communication, and the real-world application of skills and knowledge.”

Liberal arts strengthen democracy and helps a rising generation become flexible, well-prepared workers and citizens.

Teaching political science to disadvantaged and overburdened college students has filled me with hope despite brutal daily headlines. Many schools that serve the less privileged are yanking that away – and hurting all of us in the process. Our future depends on fostering minds capable of not just adapting to the world but transforming it for the better.

Michael J. Illuzzi, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Political Science and director of the CLAS Honors Program at  Lesley University