Liberal Arts Degree Advantages

High school students pondering whether or not to take on huge student loans are constantly told that college is the gateway to the middle class. College graduates aged twenty-five to thirty-two who are working full time earn about $17,500 more annually than those who have only a high school diploma, according to the Pew Research Center. According to Nicholaos Jones, not all degrees are equal, as he discusses in his article, “Liberal Arts, and the Advantages of Being Useless.” With the ever increasing price of a college education, he believes that students would be better off getting a degree in a hard subject that translates directly into a well-paying job rather than a “useless” liberal arts major with very obscure job prospects. Regardless

In general, not all graduates work in a job specific to their degree. In the case of liberal arts degrees, you use more the skills you have developed rather than the content of what you learned. In an article, college graduate Austin Jett says, “Part of it leaves you with a different perspective, a different world view,” on his use of his dual degrees in anthropology and Latin American studies. A survey done by Insider Higher Ed reported that six in ten business leaders responded that “softer” broadly applicable skills such as written and oral communications and problem-solving skills are most important for college graduates. Liberal arts degrees transcend the particular content of their degrees while others such as engineering prepare you for specialized skills for engineering applications. In the same study done by Inside Higher Ed, 73% of business leaders said that being well-rounded with a range of abilities is more important than having industry expertise because job-specific skills can be learned at work. With a liberal arts degree you learn to think critically and creatively and give you the ‘well-rounded’ advantages to career