Liberal Arts and the School of Hard Knocks

In "Advice to a liberal-arts major," Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution offers some hard-hitting practical advice to a liberal arts major frustrated with our "economic system that glorifies science, medicine, business, and law" and forces her and her liberal arts friends to "relegate our talents to hobbies while working in drudgery until we die, just to pay the bills."

I am a liberal arts major. I understand the frustrations of the liberal arts major. After graduating from college with honors but no job, I meandered for a few years through a few dead-end jobs at rock-bottom salaries before I gave up and went to grad school.

The problem was, I had learned how to think but I hadn't learned how to apply my thinking to real world problems. My value was my potential. To realize that value, I had to find someone willing to invest in translating that potential into valuable skills. After a few years of dead-end jobs, I realized that the only person willing to make that investment was me.

I borrowed more money than I'd ever earned and went to grad school. Happily, my broad liberal arts background came in handy, helping me both delve deeply into my chosen subject and learn skills people were willing to pay for.

Looking back, I'm happy my liberal arts degree forced me to walk a long and winding road. Frustrated liberal arts grads too often view their degree as an end in itself when it is really just a beginning. When I graduated from college, I had no idea where I was going. Because of that, I thought I was a failure -- my accounting and engineering friends seemed to have it all laid out before them. Today I realize that none of us ever really know where we're going, and all of us -- even accountants and engineers -- experience unexpected twists, turns and bumps in our road.

All I know is my liberal arts background equipped me to learn new things and, someday, probably sooner than I think, I'll have to apply my liberal arts-trained brain to a new set of challenges.

Comments

[pam]

Thank you very much for sharing your insights. I was a liberal-arts major too. I didn't want to go into the field my college was preparing me for (K-12 education), so it's been retail and civil service from then on. Now I'm considering graduate school too. May I ask what your major was? Have you found satisfying and gainful employment since graduation?