Is It Worth It to Go to Liberal Arts College for Just a Bachelors
Why Study the Liberal Arts?
What is a Liberal Arts Education?
Working towards a baccalaureate degree in the Liberal Arts or Sciences involves taking courses in what are traditionally referred to as the "Liberal" Arts. This means that your courses will be in general areas of study--philosophy, mathematics, literature, history, economics, languages, then on--rather than in applied or specialized fields.
A Liberal Arts teaching is not intended to train yous for a specific task, though it does prepare you for the world of work past providing y'all with an invaluable set of employability skills, including the power to recollect for yourself, the skills to communicate finer, and the capacity for lifelong learning.
What Will I Written report as Part of a Liberal Arts Didactics?
You will report a multifariousness of subjects, looking at the world and its people from diverse points of view. You lot will learn about ideas and beliefs that have guided human beings and shaped civilizations for thousands of years. Yous'll ask yourself questions like:
- What does it mean to be human?
- What have humans done, idea virtually, and felt?
- What is truth and dazzler, and what are their value to life?
- How have we been shaped by, and how have nosotros shaped, our physical and natural environment?
- What skills, methods or techniques can be used to examine the world and its people?
A Liberal Arts education is past nature broad and various, rather than narrow and specialized. Choosing courses from many disciplines gives you lot a wide and useful education.
In the outset year, a Liberal Arts student normally takes a variety of introductory courses. This non just gives you a wide knowledge of subjects only helps you to choose certain areas for further written report. In most cases, you will be encouraged to have courses in at least some of the major categories within the Liberal Arts:
- Humanities (English Literature, Foreign Languages, History, Philosophy)
- Social Sciences (Black Studies, Economics, Geography, Political Science, Folklore)
- Creative Liberal Arts (Fine Art, Theatre, Speech, Creative Writing)
- Sciences (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Math)
Liberal Arts studies at UNO also requires students to choose a major - a specific grouping of thematically-linked courses. By concentrating on a given subject field, whatever it may be, you volition become beyond the mere surface of things and gain a solid grasp of the core textile in a given area.
Why Should I Pursue a Liberal Arts Didactics?
This is the big question: Why Liberal Arts? Why non Engineering? Or Nursing? Or Informatics? There are numerous ways to answer this question, and ultimately the utility of whatsoever answer volition depend upon your own circumstances.
For you, studies in the Liberal Arts may provide the necessary applied skills that you will utilize on the job; or they may ready you to motility on to a graduate or professional school. For others, the primal value of a Liberal Arts education may exist the personal satisfaction and fulfillment that studying philosophy or art makes possible. However others will be able to excel in today's global business concern world because the strange language skills developed in their Liberal Arts education gave them an important edge.
Indeed, the reasons for pursuing a Liberal Arts education are equally many every bit the number of potential students. What you demand to ask is what you want to become out of a postsecondary education. If yous want to become a solid, broadly-based, general teaching which will better your analytical, communication and learning abilities, so the Liberal Arts may be for you lot.
What Almost Skills Grooming?
You take probably heard a lot of talk lately about how important it is to become the proper "skills set" then that y'all can be immediately attractive to an employer. Some recall that the goal of a postsecondary teaching should be to provide you with every bit much specific training as possible before you arrive on the job, thus relieving potential employers of the costs and risks associated with hiring untrained workers.
In light of this perception, many students cramp at taking general Liberal Arts courses and cull instead to focus narrowly on a vocational or professional person area of study. This can be an excellent choice. In that location are many rewarding and fulfilling careers that one can pursue with the help of a splendid vocational or career training program. But make certain that you are making your educational choices for the right reasons—those that are all-time for you. If you are shying away from Liberal Arts courses because you think that you demand preparation in specific skills to become a job, you may be mistaken.
Start, a Liberal Arts education does provide you with tangible, applied skills that employers value highly. What'south more, you will obtain skills and knowledge that are never obsolete. The world is changing speedily and there may be a danger in preparing yourself too narrowly to fit a certain slot that may not fifty-fifty be by the time you get into the chore market. Meanwhile, the underlying skills, abilities and attributes fostered in the Liberal Arts are always relevant.
What Skills Will I Learn by Taking Liberal Arts Courses?
The list of skills, abilities, capacities and attributes normally associated with a Liberal Arts education includes, but is not express to, the post-obit:
- Belittling and knowledge-edifice skills
- Evaluative and critical thinking skills
- Creative thinking skills
- Effective oral and written communication skills
- Critical and reflective reading skills
- Trouble solving and pattern intelligence skills
- Numerical skills
- Synthesis skills and the ability to express the results of assay and evaluation
- Ability to pose meaningful questions that advance understanding and knowledge
- Power to conduct enquiry and organize textile effectively
- Information literacy and other skills associated with learning how to learn
- Independent judgment and ethical decision-making
- Ability to encounter goals, manage time, and complete a project successfully
- Self-confidence and self-understanding
- Power to cooperate with others and work in teams
- Sensitivity to individuals and tolerance of cultural differences
- Ability to employ sensitive and technical equipment
- Informed openness to new information technologies
Where Can a Liberal Arts Didactics Take Me?
A Liberal Arts degree prepares y'all for hundreds of careers. Your opportunities are limited only by your imagination, your interests and your willingness to devote time and free energy to your work. Of course, a Liberal Arts degree can likewise take you lot to the height graduate and professional schools. Liberal Arts courses are frequently required for anyone who pursues a professional person degree, and a high per centum of Liberal Arts graduates go on to take further pedagogy. This is non surprising, since the Liberal Arts serve as a foundation for about vocational or professional studies at the university. For example, programs in bookkeeping, business organisation, pedagogy, journalism, and law are congenital upon the cognition and skills that come from fields that make up the Liberal Arts. Accounting and business organisation depend upon mathematics and economics; pedagogy derives from psychology and sociology; journalism requires a knowledge of English language and history; and law builds upon political scientific discipline and philosophy.
Will a Liberal Arts Education Make Me a Better Person?
A Liberal Arts education will enhance your cognition and better your agreement of the earth and its people. Many say that knowledge leads to wise action, perhaps even to goodness. Thus, a Liberal Arts pedagogy may help you to perceive and to understand your shortcomings, allowing you to become a ameliorate citizen, friend, spouse, parent, human being.
Liberal Arts courses frequently enable students to reach across their own experiences and imagine worlds far distant in time and infinite. Past opening your eyes, ears and mind, a good Liberal Arts education tin strengthen in you the virtues of tolerance, sympathy, and respect for others. A Liberal Arts didactics will equip you lot to participate effectively in your customs. It tin can also assist you lot to engage in the controversies of our time--whether about the environment, cultural diversity, social justice, ethnic strife, gender relations or foreign policy.
Can a Liberal Arts Education Make Me Happy?
It would exist ridiculous to make whatsoever promises of a carefree future, but a Liberal Arts education can contribute to your happiness. Studies in the humanities offer an obvious grooming for leisure and life beyond the world of work. A good Liberal Arts education increases your capacity to sympathize and savor humanity's cultural and scientific achievements. It also contributes to the pleasure you can get from the globe around you. Studies in your Liberal Arts plan tin can increase your sensation and appreciation of literature, music, personality, nature, art, symbolism, wit, historical allusion or figurative language.
But more that, a good general educational activity allows you to see things whole, to provide a context for seemingly meaningless or isolated events. This may sound similar an abstruse benefit, but it is merely this orientation for knowledge that might reduce the defoliation and frustration that comes from being unable to put into context an outcome, decision or phenomenon that you encounter in your daily life. Perchance this helps explain, to a certain extent, why studies consistently bear witness that educated people have, statistically, happier relationships, lower rates of depression, less loneliness, and a college degree of satisfaction with life.
Merely is a Liberal Arts Caste Worth It in Today'southward High-Tech Globe?
A Liberal Arts degree is valuable in itself, merely also teaches many of the skills and abilities that are needed in the contemporary workplace. That is why managers in concern, manufacture and government appreciate the value of a Liberal Arts degree in potential employees. They recognize the importance of what are oft called "employability skills"--reading, writing, listening, speaking effectively, knowledge of language, critical thinking, problem-solving, basic numeracy, information literacy and the capacity to go on to learn for life--and know that UNO Liberal Arts programs have always full-bodied on just these skills. Students, too, understand that Liberal Arts Faculties tend to practice the best task in developing these general employability skills. That is one of the reasons that students continue to vote with their feet by enrolling in Liberal Arts programs in high numbers.
Still, there is a perception out there that technical trainees go high wage jobs in their fields while Liberal Arts graduates confront high unemployment or can discover but low wage jobs that exercise not apply their university training. A common stereotype portrays the poor Liberal Arts grad stuck in a dead-end McJob. In fact, this is a gross misrepresentation of labor market reality. More than than ever, an undergraduate higher education is a sound investment. Recent studies in both the U.S. and Canada have demonstrated that a high level of education translates into college income over a person's lifetime. These studies show that almost academy graduates, including those with Liberal Arts degrees, have lower unemployment rates and college lifetime earnings than people with only high school diplomas or technical/vocational credentials.
But in that location is more to it than a simple link between pedagogy and income. A recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Evolution (OECD) points to what it calls "literacy skills" as the key gene that pays off in any task. Literacy, in this sense, involves the types of skills that are fostered in Liberal Arts programs: the power to sympathize and utilise prose, to analyze documents, and to work with numbers. The study, entitled Literacy Skills for the Knowledge Order, contains data comparing the literacy skills of people in 12 countries. It finds that the ability to comprehend and utilize words and figures plays a strong role in determining wages, especially in countries like Canada and the Usa. It is worth noting, however, that low literacy rates tin can exist found even in people with college teaching. The report points out that your educational credentials may get yous a chore in the get-go place, but having strong literacy skills will make yous the kind of productive and useful employee who rises through the ranks. Moreover, workers with loftier literacy skills can adapt more easily to changing circumstances, making them less vulnerable to unemployment and more likely to exist high income earners. In a quickly irresolute, information-based economic system, the benefits of literacy cannot be overestimated.
What Should I Exercise?
Merely you lot can know what is best for you at this time in your life. Nevertheless, you should explore all of your opportunities, including a Liberal Arts education. Talk to your counselor. Speak with friends, relatives or co-workers about their educational experiences. Read up on the trends and developments that might influence your decision. Admissions officers can assistance you lot go into the areas of your choice. And fiscal help or awards officers can advise y'all on how to access scholarships or student loans.
Whatever you lot practice, don't let opportunities pass you by because you accept failed to get the material you need to make an informed choice. Only think, a postsecondary educational activity tin can be expensive. It is a lot of work. And information technology represents a major investment of fourth dimension and energy. So don't waste your coin or your time doing something that you really don't want to practice. You will be happier and more likely to succeed if y'all follow your heart, practise whatever you do for your own reasons, and wait at a postsecondary didactics for what it is: an opportunity for yous to grow and develop as a human beingness.
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Source: https://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-arts-and-sciences/academic-advising-center/choosing-a-major/liberal-arts.php