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<p>A wonderful goal, but I wonder what fraction of liberal arts majors graduating today (at least from your average non-elite school) have received this “successful” liberal arts education. I see a lot of floundering kids bouncing around for years from art history to political science to psychology. It’s not clear to me that these kids have developed any particular “capacity for innovation” as a result of this five, six, or seven-year process or that they have demonstrated any “capacity for judgement” in their choices. </p>
<p>I am honestly interested to hear what kind of decent career options are available with a liberal arts BA, as the data points I have aren’t encouraging. I’m not disputing the value of a liberal arts education as preparation for graduate school or professional school, but perhaps it is not appropriate for all students, many of whom will not be pursuing post-graduate education. </p>
<p>Our society also needs engineers, nurses, accountants, pharmacists, early childhood educators, business managers, and other professions that can be pursued with a more specialized undergraduate eduation. I guarantee that our society would quickly implode if it were comprised exclusively of either engineers or liberal arts majors.</p>
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<p>I learned how to use a slide rule in 9th grade Chemistry, and through the process I also developed an intuitive understanding of logarithms, scientific notation, mantissas and exponents, estimation, and error-checking. These “habits of the mind” developed by manipulating slide rules in high school chemistry and other “skills” I learned that I no longer directly use have served me well over the years, and I have even survived the demise of slide rules and vaccuum tubes. Using this development as the math/science/engineering analog of the liberal arts education, I see where the author is coming from, even if I wasn’t wired to follow that path myself.</p>