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One of the most persistent and unhelpful myths in American higher education is the correlation of an institution's selectivity with its academic quality and ROI in terms of employability and lifetime income. Next in line is the notion that only a "pre-professional" degree, usually Business, Computer Science, Engineering or other disciplines that directly correlate to careers, is valuable.
With college costs rising and a tight job market for young people, it's understandable that parents and students want to invest in educations that yield lifetime value. However, conventional wisdom about what the most valuable educations are and where they are delivered is not always accurate. As happens with many aspects of culture, ultimately, the tail can come to wag the dog—because of student preference for professional programs, colleges are increasingly cutting humanities and arts programs and adding Business and STEM programs, especially if they are struggling with enrollment or budgetary issues.
Personally, I have always advocated for the value of a content-oriented degree alongside business or coding education. I don't know any entrepreneurs who aren't passionate about some idea or solution-- not just the notion of managing money and running a business. I've been intrigued to hear that universities like Georgia Tech are re-imagining Computer Science as a corresponding discipline that should be combined with another field, rather than taught on its own, for the benefit of most students. They are beginning to restructure their curriculum to reflect this vision, and I expect more colleges will follow suit.
This is a vast conversation, but here are a few related articles on specific aspects of the current reality from my article archive.
This article is several years old, but the central argument is even more important now. Even in 2016, 1 in 5 degrees conferred were to business majors. In 2025, an excessive number of these graduates will compete for a limited number of jobs while lacking the kind of training that will help them shape and excel at the jobs needed in 2040.
American undergraduates are flocking to business programs, and finding plenty of entry-level opportunities. But when businesses go hunting for CEOs or managers, “they will say, a couple of decades out, that I’m looking for a liberal arts grad,” said Judy Samuelson, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program.
That presents a growing challenge to colleges and universities. Students are clamoring for degrees that will help them secure jobs in a shifting economy, but to succeed in the long term, they’ll require an education that allows them to grow, adapt, and contribute as citizens—and to build successful careers. And it’s why many schools are shaking up their curricula to ensure that undergraduate business majors receive something they may not even know they need—a rigorous liberal-arts education.
One of the major problems here is the branding of liberal arts and SLAC's, aka small liberal arts colleges. "Small" is the average size of a US college, but TV sports and research occurring among non-teaching researchers and graduate students have long elevated the less-common Research 1 universities into public consciousness. In reality, a moderately sized school is designed to facilitate the factors that actually differentiate the value of an undergraduate college education: chiefly, belonging, mentorship, relationships and opportunity for hands-on applied research and internships. While conventional wisdom suggests that larger research universities will provide these, in fact, the primary focus of those schools is generally not undergraduate teaching or research, and it's always easier to find your people quickly in a manageable community that like-minded people have chosen and been selected for, versus a crowd of over 30,000 students.
The two other problems with the branding and cultural currency of liberal arts education are in the name itself, made of two words that have other primary meanings today, derived from a medieval concept of the whole of human understanding. In practice, most university educations in the US deliver some liberal arts component, at minimum in the form of required general courses. The difference in a liberal arts college is that the number of courses required to fulfill those requirements is roughly equal to the number that will be taken within a major area, and those courses will be taught by full-time, mostly PhD-holding faculty in classes intimate enough to allow for discussion and collaboration. As a product of this kind of education, I have always seen one of its primary benefits as the practice of learning to master steep learning curves in new knowledge paradigms, in the space of a semester. I also believe that the more you know and understand different disciplines, the fuller your view of your focus area, the more creative your approaches to it, and the more prepared you'll be for jobs that don't exist yet.
Bottom line: we should think of liberal arts colleges as student and teaching-focused undergraduate accelerators.
The same student growth and alumni market saturation seen in Business departments is happening in Computer Science, as degree offerings proliferate and colleges like Stanford add more and more seats to their undergraduate departments.
Again, the Atlantic takes on the topic: Universities Have a Computer-Science Problem:
I was pleased to see this last piece in the NY Times last month, as it reinforces the truth behind a misperception that too often informs college choice. While the article acknowledges some challenges in practice, some of the kinds of companies often held up as places that will only hire from the most "elite" (aka highly selective) colleges are making an effort to change that narrative and perception.
The pitch is basically meritocracy. And it’s everywhere. McKinsey has developed a video game to assess candidates’ cognitive skills, which it says gives it “insight beyond the résumé or conventional interview.” And it has published an interview prep website that a spokesperson said was necessary “so exceptional candidates from any source can succeed in our interviews, regardless of whether they have access to resources like a consulting club, active career services support, or an alumni network that’s well-connected within the consulting industry.” Bank of America has partnerships with 34 community colleges, and says it has hired and trained thousands of employees from these schools. Goldman Sachs switched to doing interviews for entry-level jobs virtually instead of only at a few top-level schools. “We now encounter talent from places we previously didn’t get to,” its global head of human capital wrote in 2019.
What's the takeaway? There are many viable educational pathways that can lead to the same quality of outcomes. Academic and experience-based job skills and interpersonal abilities are the qualities that most employers seek, and that move you forward in a career. The educational environments that best fit your needs and comfort are the best places to grow toward launching yourself into your adult and professional lives.
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