Have you ever wondered what it meant when someone told you that a college or university was a “great liberal arts school”? Can you study science or math at a place that calls itself a liberal arts school? Will you ever be able to get a job with a degree from one of them? The answer to the last two questions is a resounding “Yes!” In fact, the liberal arts model is one of the oldest and most conservative aspects of modern education. Most colleges and universities in the U.S. offer a liberal arts curriculum, and even if they don’t know it, the majority of undergraduates today have an education in the liberal arts. But what exactly does that mean?
Centuries before universities ever existed, people organized human knowledge into seven major categories known as the “Seven Liberal Arts.” When the first universities were chartered in the medieval cities of Europe, these were the main fields that were taught. The first North American universities, such as Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary, modeled themselves on the great English universities at Oxford and Cambridge, where undergraduate education was based on an updated understanding of the medieval concept of the liberal arts. Students accepted to such universities were (and still are) affiliated with a smaller unit within the institution, called a college. When smaller schools, such as Williams College, began to take shape, they resembled one of these subdivisions of the larger universities, and their curriculum also reflected those schools’ liberal arts emphasis. That is how we ended up with the strange-sounding term “liberal arts college.”
School size actually has very little to do with the definition of a liberal arts education. Although liberal arts colleges are small, a liberal arts curriculum can be found at a variety of institutions. Whether you study at a large state university or a tiny, private college, you will probably have to fulfill a range of breadth requirements in your first two or three years, including courses in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. These are the modern building blocks of the liberal arts education. In this respect, liberal arts schools are different from those with a highly focused and specialized curriculum, such as engineering schools or music conservatories.
At a liberal arts school, an art history major ends up spending some time in the biology lab or working calculus problem sets, and an astronomy major cannot avoid a dose of poetry and history. The benefits of this sort of education are many. Imagine that you disliked science all through high school, but when you sign up for “Physics for Nonmajors” your freshman year in college, you discover that you actually love physics and want to learn more about it. Or let’s take a less extreme example of the math major who enrolls in a Shakespeare course to fulfill a requirement and discovers an enthusiasm for theater that becomes a lifelong hobby. The journey of discovery that is a liberal arts education will enrich your approach to whatever career you pursue, because it will give you the ability to think broadly and insightfully across categories.
Ultimately, in any career, the people who rise to the top of their chosen field are almost always those who can think outside the box, challenge conventional wisdom, and synthesize information from diverse sources. The liberal arts are the boot camp for these skills.
