Report: Colleges Have a Role to Play in Ensuring Students With Liberal Arts Degrees Are Market-Ready
By Joelle Fredman, NASFAA Staff Reporter
As the cost of college continues to rise, policymakers are becoming increasingly interested in holding institutions more accountable for student outcomes, including their ability to repay federal student loans. Colleges can take more control over ensuring their students succeed by informing them of employer needs and how to maximize their potential earnings outcomes after graduating from liberal arts programs, which are typically associated with lower salaries, according to a new report from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
In their paper, “Saving the Liberal Arts: Making the Bachelor's Degree a Better Path to Labor Market Success,” authors Mark Schneider and Matthew Sigelman analyzed millions of job postings and resumes and found that employers were not only looking for the “broad” knowledge advertised by liberal arts programs, but also for technical skills. They argued that of the 3.8 million entry-level job openings across the U.S. for those with bachelor’s degrees, liberal arts majors would qualify for more than one-third of them and earn a comparable salary to those in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields — if they expanded their skill set to meet market needs.
“The liberal arts graduates lacking identifiable and practical skills are more likely to be underemployed than other graduates and may suffer a wage penalty relative to their peers in other fields of study that may last throughout their work life,” the authors wrote. “...The right skills (e.g., digital design) adding to the right major (e.g., fine art) can lead to a good job with a good future.”
And while the authors argued that students need to be aware of the combination of skills needed to jumpstart and grow their careers, they also wrote that colleges need to assume responsibility for student outcomes by advising them on how to add to their skill sets to market themselves to employers.
“Just as students must explore new ways of mastering and certifying their command of in-demand skills, colleges must explore new methods of informing students of employer needs and potential earnings outcomes and providing active career coaching for students to maximize the value of educational experiences,” the authors wrote.
Colleges have a big stake in how their students perform economically after they graduate; institutions with default rates of 30 percent or higher for three consecutive years and/or more than 40 percent for one year could lose their eligibility for one or more federal student aid programs. In fact, the national cohort default rate has slightly increased from 11.3 percent for borrowers whose loans went into repayment in fiscal year (FY) 2013 to 11.5 percent in FY 2014, after three consecutive years of decreasing.
The authors highlighted initiatives that some states and universities are taking to help prepare liberal arts students for high-paying careers, such as the “Launch My Career” website, which shows students at Florida, Colorado, Tennessee, and Texas universities their potential earnings by field of study, as well as the monetary value of adding new skills to their major. In addition to online tools, some universities have created new programs to ensure their students will be market-ready with high-demand skills. The University of Utah, for example, created its Degree Plus program to offer short-term post baccalaureate certificates to liberal arts graduates in areas such as data analysis and digital communications, and Northwestern University’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities provides its students with the opportunity to work alongside thousands of employers at companies related to their field of interest.
By helping to prepare liberal arts students for high-paying careers, universities can take active steps to ensuring that students earn salaries that allow them to repay their loans.
“A liberal arts education is not dead, nor it is necessarily a dead end,” the authors wrote. “Rather a good liberal arts education must provide students with a strong set of foundational analytic and communications skills. But students need to consider how to add identifiable practical or technical skills to that foundation to make family-sustaining wages and to advance to high-paying job opportunities, and colleges need to ensure they do all they can to get students there.”
Publication Date: 2/26/2018
Ben F | 2/27/2018 2:46:52 PM
Does this hint at gainful employment regulations moving to liberal arts programs? It would be nice for all to be held to the same standards when it comes to a student's well being and ability to repay student loans.
David S | 2/27/2018 10:50:22 AM
"Colleges have a big stake in how their students perform economically after they graduate," but what never gets acknowledged in these types of articles or studies is that even if schools provide students with marketable skills and effective career counseling and placement services, they have no real impact on students' career choices, their success at jobs, the biases and prejudices that exist in salary structures throughout our workforce and economy, etc. It may be that the best social workers, the best counselors, the best elementary teachers, the best employees at human rights organizations, all from School A, get paid less than the worst engineer, the worst MBA or the worst lawyer from School B. Does that mean that School A is doing something wrong? Its graduates are excelling in their chosen fields, but not as handsomely remunerated...which is simply because engineers inevitably get paid more than social workers (and don't think for a minute that that isn't largely based on gender, too).
My fear is that the inevitable result will be schools pumping their resources into STEM fields and others that they're confident will lead to bigger paychecks. That means that even though virtually every field you can name is filled with successful leaders and innovators with liberal arts backgrounds, those fields will be marginalized in favor of engineers and the like. The diversity of our culture and our economy demands that we have well prepared professionals in all fields, not just STEM.
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