Is the point of college to prepare students for jobs and careers? If so, what is the place of the liberal arts?

The University of North Carolina faculty assembly released a study on how a liberal arts–based education can provide “career readiness.” In today’s Martin Center article, Reagan Allen talks with music professor Toby King about that study.

King thinks that many students have misconceptions about the point of college:

If you base the value of an education on your immediate earnings after college, you’ve selected one narrow metric, but you haven’t selected the many values of an education over many years or even over a lifetime. So if I get a degree in music—I teach in the music department—if I get a degree in music, my first gig out of college is not going to represent the value of that music degree to me over five years, 10 years, or 20 years. It may be that my musical education gives me an ability to communicate, to learn about shared new languages, and to use contemporary technology in a way that pays off, both in my playing and in any job I may undertake over the next few years.

That’s a good point. Young people are prone to thinking in the short term, neglecting long-term considerations.

Moreover, students set on a major geared toward a career should be urged to consider how good liberal arts courses can benefit them. King continues:

I think it’s easy to imagine students in a STEM field taking advantage of a liberal-arts perspective to channel their enthusiasm. I myself teach a class in which students learn to use computer-aided design software and build their own electric guitar, and assemble the thing on their own with our guidance, and learn about the theories behind the sounds and the electronics and the music theory that they’re putting into play with these electric guitars. So it puts the technology into a human context.

It would be far easier for UNC and other universities to get students interested in the liberal arts if they hadn’t allowed departments and courses to become arenas for left-wing political indoctrination. Students don’t see the value of that sort of “education.” But it’s good to know some professors are trying to make the liberal arts appealing and valuable.