Valuing the Liberal Arts: Alumni Lessons

How can we assess both the actual and the perceived value of a liberal arts degree? At its core, liberal arts study is associated with the preparation of responsible citizens, implying an important role at state universities, which have an inherent commitment to the public good. Upon close examination, narratives about the liberal arts’ lack of practical value, ideas that, we discovered, are embraced by many liberal arts alumni themselves, prove to be myths and misconceptions. Nonetheless, that Republican governors in places like Texas, Florida, and North Carolina have called liberal arts degrees “economically irrelevant, unaffordable luxuries” suggests the cultural and institutional pervasiveness of the liberal arts’ devaluing (Kleinman 86). College has long offered students the promise of increased economic mobility, and, beginning in the 1930s, the vast majority of students have enrolled in higher education institutions primarily to advance their careers (Grubb and Lazerson). For that reason, especially since the 2008 recession, many students are being drawn to STEM fields, business, and other areas of study perceived as expedient routes to well-paid positions. Meanwhile, as emphasized in Nathan Heller’s recent and perhaps premature pronouncement of “the end of the English major,” the number of majors in history, English, languages, and religion has plummeted (Schmidt). The trend of equating value with a quick return on investment has meant that the true worth of a liberal arts degree frequently goes unrecognized.

Many scholars have articulated the extra-economic value of the humanities and, by extension, the liberal arts, arguing that robust education in such subjects plays an important role in generating just, democratic, globally conscious, culturally rich societies (Belfiore; Butler; Fitzpatrick; Kent; Nussbaum). According to these thinkers, becoming skilled at things like undertaking critical analysis, encountering others with empathy, communicating a distinctive perspective, and identifying meaningful connections between seemingly disparate entities contributes to the public good. However, the “rich set of interpretive, critical, and ethical skills” that liberal arts study fosters (Fitzpatrick 17), skills that are essential in our increasingly polarized but also interdependent world, defy quantification and, by extension, easy valuation. Moreover, there are compelling reasons to be concerned that a perceived need to justify the value of the liberal arts or make their value more readily apparent to more people plays into a neoliberal regime that puts profitability, measurable impact, and marketable skills above all else (Butler 18–31). Nonetheless, as devaluation of liberal arts education becomes increasingly normalized, the need for a range of innovative “argument[s] for the employment relevance of liberal arts and humanities education” is urgent (Kleinman 87).

There is real risk in accepting the idea that liberal arts study is a luxury for the privileged few. As the philosopher Elizabeth Minnich makes clear, in situations “when the extraordinary becomes ordinary” (here we might consider acceptance of “the big lie” about the 2020 election), to create a serious crisis “it just takes . . . an ability to go along thoughtlessly—by which I mean without paying attention, reflecting, questioning—to play the game as careerists everywhere do, hoping to win, if, by unquestioned rules, one plays it well” (2). Individuals can succeed without a liberal arts education, but there may be a cost to democracy and the public good. Currently, concern about the liberal arts certainly exceeds the economic sphere: because liberal arts students are trained to question foundational power structures like patriarchy and white supremacy, it is no coincidence that attacks on higher education disproportionately affect the liberal arts.

Democracy itself has become threatened by widespread partisan gerrymandering as well as by initiatives designed to suppress voting rights. According to Christopher Newfield, this political environment has prompted public universities to reduce their commitment to the public good, causing the liberal arts’ extra-economic value to be underestimated even within the institutions meant to make liberal arts education widely accessible (81). A metric like financial return on investment captures only a fraction of such society-shaping value, and attaining an accurate understanding of what the liberal arts offer us demands that we find new and nuanced approaches to assessing and communicating value.

We sought new evidence by surveying liberal arts alumni of a large public university, the University of Texas, Austin. We emailed a survey with both quantitative and qualitative components to thousands of alumni who graduated between 1996 and 2016—that is, those who finished their degrees in the last few decades but have had a few years to establish themselves in their professions. Acknowledging the economic importance of higher education, we asked alumni to describe skills they developed through their majors and how those skills apply to their professional lives. But we also asked about their participation in public life and the extent to which the liberal arts influenced their sense of purpose and their capacity to respond to social and personal issues. Finally, we included a Net Promoter Score (NPS) question, asking alumni how likely they were to recommend a liberal arts degree to students today. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most revealing data we gathered from over four hundred responses were qualitative: stories about how studying the liberal arts shaped lives and careers. These data are difficult to summarize, and we do not have space to do them all justice here.

Most of the liberal arts alumni we surveyed are engaged citizens who are passionate about their work and satisfied with their incomes. Even so, a significant number raised concerns about whether the nonvocational emphasis of a liberal arts degree remains viable for students in the current economy, given the price tag. Others claimed their education left them underprepared for professional life. Narratives in public discourse—and in some of the alumni responses—about the liberal arts’ lack of value reflect a neoliberal logic that prioritizes immediate return on financial investment over all other factors. Qualitative responses to our NPS question reveal this most vividly, conveying the concerns and faulty assumptions central to the debate over the value of the liberal arts. The real benefits of the liberal arts are being lost in a false dichotomy between supposedly practical and ostensibly nonvocational educational paths.

We focus here on the NPS responses, but a few other findings are notable, including the range of fields in which our respondents are employed (see table 1) and their tendency to be leaders. Job titles varied widely, but nearly half the respondents who gave a job title identified themselves as holding leadership roles, among them manager, account executive, owner, development officer, senior editor, senior data analyst, senior strategic adviser, CEO, founder, general counsel, vice president, principal, and so forth. Most respondents are professionals, and a significant majority (71.0%) agreed with the statement “I’m passionate about my job. I value the work and/or the organization I work for highly.” Nearly as many (69.9%) agreed with the statement “I am satisfied with the compensation I receive for the work that I do.” Given concerns about the liberal arts’ lack of practical value, we asked respondents to identify skills they developed through their liberal arts study. The three most common selections were “communicating clearly in written form,” “identifying connections between or patterns among disparate concepts or situations,” and “empathizing with others and understanding different perspectives” (see table 2). When asked to select which skill is most useful to their current professional or personal lives, participants’ top three responses remained the same but in a slightly different order: communicating (22.2%), empathizing (18.7%), then identifying connections (16.0%). That these three skills were repeatedly emphasized highlights their value and flexibility. Our data affirm that writing clearly and persuasively, making meaningful connections, and being able to understand others’ perspectives—skills often gained from studying the liberal arts—are critical for a wide range of professional and personal pursuits. However, that no more than a quarter of respondents selected the same skill as being most valuable indicates a high degree of variance in the skills demanded by alumni’s professional and personal lives. With paths available to liberal arts majors open and uncertain, they are likely to find value in skills with flexibility and broad applicability.

The applicability of liberal arts skills to work that appears unrelated or distantly related to liberal arts fields emerged as a striking theme in respondents’ comments. One alumnus in residency as a physician explains, “[M]ost of my patients do not speak English. Because of my linguistics degree I am able to break down this foreign language and find what similarities there are with English, and then use context clues to gain further understanding. I find that many of my colleagues who don’t have linguistic backgrounds are struggling with this, even those who are already bilingual.” Another respondent notes, “I work with software now, testing against certain criteria. The computational parts of philosophy, which I didn’t even realize were computational at the time, helped me pick up coding on my own relatively quickly.”

Yet, when prompted to identify competencies they wish they had, many respondents reported a desire to learn skills more obviously applicable to jobs, including finance and business skills, quantitative skills (especially statistics), and tech skills. More prominent however, was the desire to have been better prepared to navigate the job market and to identify and apply skills they already had.

The NPS question asked participants to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely they were to recommend studying the liberal arts to someone pursuing a degree today. By NPS logic, those who answered with a 9 or 10 are considered promoters, those who gave a 7 or 8 are considered passive, and those who gave a 1–6 are considered detractors (“What”). The NPS metric, almost always phrased as “would you recommend today” is commonly used in the business world, but it is increasingly applied in other realms as well, and survey specialists encouraged us to include an NPS question in our study. Offering a quantitative approach to assessing value, the NPS, unlike statistics related to income or return on investment, is not inherently financial. Our NPS question yielded some fascinating responses, but the NPS framework has real limitations, especially when assessing an idea as complicated as the value of the liberal arts. Though sometimes framed as the “ultimate question,” even some marketing and business researchers have misgivings about the NPS’s reliability (Kristensen and Eskildsen).

The use of NPS as a measure in higher education raises particular concerns: Does a metric created for businesses tend to reify value as financial return on investment? Our question was not Would you make the same choices if you could go back in time? but, rather, Would you recommend a liberal arts degree to someone today? NPS questions are generally posed to customers shortly after they have used a product or service, not years later. Moreover, respondents’ internal calculus for answering the question “How likely are you to recommend studying the liberal arts to someone pursuing a degree today?” is likely to be incomparable to their approach to recommending a product or service. In the end, alumni’s NPS responses may shed more light on their assumptions about higher education and their own notions of value than the actual value of a liberal arts major for current students. Still, these notions of value are worth considering.

Most notably, the NPS gauged by our survey seems incongruent with our other findings about alumni skill development and career satisfaction. A -11.7 NPS, derived from subtracting the percentage of promoters from the percentage of detractors, seems to suggest that most liberal arts alumni do not perceive their course of study to be valuable enough to actively promote it. However, in isolation, the NPS presents a distorted perspective. The NPS framework of promoters who chose a 9 or 10 and detractors who chose a much broader range of numbers (1–6) casts measured, thoughtful responses as irrelevant or wholly negative and responses that deal in absolutes as disproportionately significant.

Qualitative responses elaborating on respondents’ NPS choices indicated that alumni understood choosing a course of study in college or graduate school as a considerable investment, an exploration of core passions and values, and a lifestyle choice with decades-long repercussions. The repetition of comments like “it was great for me, but I would tailor my advice to the individual,” by someone who would be considered by the NPS framework to be a detractor (because they gave a 5), suggests that many alumni would prioritize recommending a major that is a good fit for a given student over offering a blanket recommendation of the liberal arts. Indeed, most alumni comments (65.3%) expressed willingness to recommend a liberal arts major in certain situations. This qualitative analysis complicates some of the NPS framework’s simplistic assumptions.

The qualifications alumni offered for recommending a liberal arts degree contained practical advice, misconceptions, and expressions of internal conflict between economic concerns and appreciation for the long-term multidimensional value of liberal arts education. Indeed, another detractor (giving a 5) said they would strongly recommend studying the liberal arts to someone trying to find their calling or whose primary concern is social justice but not to someone whose “ideal role in the future involves making buckets of money.” Many respondents qualified their recommendations by suggesting that liberal arts students need to get a graduate degree “to earn a decent living” or take on another, more practical major. These qualifications are half sound advice and half underestimations of liberal arts degrees’ value. Attaining a graduate degree does have a positive impact on liberal arts graduates’ income, but living a fulfilling life with only a liberal arts bachelor’s degree is quite possible. The prevalence of a narrative that liberal arts students benefit substantially from training in an additional field obscures the fact that the reverse is also true: most other degrees benefit substantially from liberal arts training.

Alumni comments suggest the rising cost of higher education, combined with the perception that liberal arts majors simply do not pay off financially, dissuades many alumni who had positive experiences themselves from recommending a liberal arts path to upcoming generations. Some alumni can be understood as genuine detractors: they not only tended to assume that liberal arts majors won’t attain a desirable level of income in the current economy, but they also frequently implied that making money is the sole or primary purpose of higher education. A comment such as “I would not recommend a degree in a field that barely pays the bills” is representative of genuine detractors’ belief that financial gain is the main point of higher education and that a college education without a clear and obvious path to employment is a waste of money.

Respondents repeatedly expressed concern that liberal arts graduates would be ill prepared for the most competitive jobs because they would not finish school with a “tangible skill set”; the notion that liberal arts skills have no application in “the real world” was a recurring theme as well. The tendency to understand liberal arts education as distinct from “the real world” suggests a revealing myth about the liberal arts. According to this myth, the world that matters is a world of commerce and hard skills that manages to be independent of other human concerns. Within this myth, liberal arts skills are effectively rendered unreal and unimportant by their perceived lack of association with financial gain. Related to detractors’ sense of the liberal arts’ irrelevance to “the real world” is the sentiment that, as another respondent wrote, “a liberal arts degree is a luxury for those who can afford it.” In this view, a liberal arts degree is an impractical pursuit that, to draw on another alumni comment, “seems increasingly for” those “whose parents are able to support them no matter what career path they pick.”

Despite alumni concerns about the financial and employment potential of liberal arts degrees, our own data for other studies show that liberal arts students’ professional outcomes contrast sharply with liberal arts detractors’ views. Liberal arts majors’ earning potential is greater than some may believe, and they have similar life and job satisfaction and unemployment rates as other majors (State of the Humanities). Moreover, scholars of business are themselves increasingly likely to recognize that “innovation needs the liberal arts, and the discipline, focus, and skill set that comes with serious study of them” (Gobble 51).

Our respondents’ comments suggest that liberal arts subjects’ nonvocational nature and the broad applicability of liberal arts skills can make it relatively challenging to find desirable work immediately after college. Liberal arts majors trade some early career remuneration for the very nonvocational skills that many alumni characterize as widely “useful in the long term.” As one alumnus insists, “I’m more successful than some people with business or engineering degrees.” Moreover, we suspect that the most efficient approach to helping students attain lucrative jobs is likely an inefficient approach to helping students become thoughtful contributors to the public good.

The vast majority (79.1%) of our respondents agreed with the statement “My liberal arts education helps me to better understand and respond to societal issues.” But promoters distinguished themselves from other respondents by highlighting the public value of liberal arts study, and their responses suggest a positive correlation between valuing liberal arts education and contributing to the public good. Promoters were significantly more likely than detractors to strongly agree that they act in ways that support their communities (54.9% of promoters vs. 29.8% of detractors) and were more likely to say they voted in state and local elections (85.1% vs. 72.8%). As one promoter notes, “[The liberal arts] teach you how to think” and are “one of the greatest tools to prevent domestic chaos and the disintegration of our democracy as a result of miseducation, misinformation, and anarchy.” Promoters also revealed a tendency toward a holistic view in which the most valuable professional preparation also serves as preparation for public and personal life. “A Liberal Arts degree cultivates lifelong learning,” one alumnus notes. “Students spend four years in college and forty years in the labor market. A lot of economic and technological change happens in that time. What students learn in a Liberal Arts education is uniquely suited to serve them well throughout their working lives.”

To create long-term solutions in the face of increasing political polarization, widespread disinformation, out-of-control gun violence, and a climate crisis threatening our very existence, we must recenter higher education’s commitment to the greater good, alongside its well-established capacity to enhance economic mobility. Higher education institutions should emphasize how and why the education they provide equips students to contribute to the public good and why this is important. We did not find a correlation between the level of debt alumni had taken on to finance their educations and whether they were likely to recommend studying the liberal arts. But we did find concerns about the short-term job prospects of liberal arts graduates to be the outstanding factor limiting alumni’s willingness to recommend the liberal arts to individuals pursuing degrees today. So, what is to be done?

Liberal arts skills are flexible and have long-term value. However, students need guidance to recognize the distinct value of a nonvocational education. We recommend training instructors to identify—and communicate—the “competencies” that students are gaining in their classes. This is especially true for PhD students in the liberal arts, whose professional development typically presumes they will wind up as tenure-track professors (Cassuto and Weisbuch; Rogers). In addition, liberal arts programs could make a few curricular adjustments to equip students with a better foundation for pursuing meaningful career paths without shifting the focus of the liberal arts degree from education of the person to job training. The rise of interdisciplinary fields like health humanities and digital humanities indicate the value of bringing the liberal arts to seemingly disparate subjects. Students stand to gain a great deal from discovering new approaches to standard subjects: for instance, courses in business and finance informed by literary theory, courses that critically examine the history of statistics, or courses that discuss the intersection of psychological studies and web design. Such course content need not water down or devalue the liberal arts but instead can emphasize their widespread value. Finally, we would strongly encourage all students to pursue professional experience during college and to make use of career services early in their college careers. Internships and mentoring that help students understand how to put their liberal arts skills to work should be integral to the liberal arts experience. A liberal arts education should include pathways for recognizing and discovering just how a student’s skills and knowledge may be applied in unexpected and new ways. Learning how to quickly adapt and gain competencies in any context while recognizing one’s role and responsibility as a citizen and community member are crucial liberal arts skills that are too easy to undervalue.

Works Cited

Belfiore, Eleonora. “‘Impact’, ‘Value’ and ‘Bad Economics’: Making Sense of the Problem of Value in the Arts and Humanities.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, vol. 14, no. 1, 2015, pp. 95–110.

Butler, Judith. “Ordinary Incredulous.” The Humanities and Public Life, edited by Peter Brooks and Hilary Jewett, Fordham UP, 2014, pp. 16–37.

Cassuto, Leonard, and Robert Weisbuch. The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education. Johns Hopkins UP, 2021.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. Johns Hopkins UP, 2019.

Gobble, MaryAnne M. “Innovation Needs the Liberal Arts.” Research-Technology Management, vol. 62, no. 2, 2019, pp. 51–55.

Grubb, W. Norton, and Marvin Lazerson. “Vocationalism in Higher Education: The Triumph of the Education Gospel.” Journal of Higher Education, vol. 76, no. 1, 2005, pp. 1–25.

Heller, Nathan. “The End of the English Major.” The New Yorker, 27 Feb. 2023, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-major.

Kent, Eliza. “What Are You Going to Do with That? Arguing for the Humanities in an Era of Efficiency.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, vol. 11, no. 3, 2012, pp. 273–84.

Kleinman, Daniel Lee. “Sticking Up for Liberal Arts and Humanities Education: Governance, Leadership, and Fiscal Crisis.” A New Deal for the Humanities, edited by Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed, Rutgers UP, 2016, pp. 86–100.

Kristensen, Kai, and Jacob Eskildsen. “Is the NPS a Trustworthy Performance Measure?” TQM Journal, vol. 26, no. 2, 2014, pp. 202–14.

Minnich, Elizabeth Kamarck. The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2017.

Newfield, Christopher. “What Are the Humanities For? Rebuilding the Public University.” A New Deal for the Humanities, edited by Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed, Rutgers UP, 2016, pp. 160–78.

Nussbaum, Martha C. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Updated ed., Princeton UP, 2016.

Rogers, Katina L. Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom. Duke UP, 2020.

Schmidt, Benjamin. “The Humanities Are in Crisis.” Atlantic, 23 Aug. 2018, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/the-humanities-face-a-crisisof-confidence/567565/.

State of the Humanities 2021: Workforce and Beyond. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2021, www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/publication/downloads/2021_Humanities-Indicators_Workforce.pdf.

“What Is Net Promoter Score^®? Your Introduction to NPS.” Hotjar, www.hotjar.com/net-promoter-score/. Accessed 18 Oct. 2024.

Table 1. Fields in Which Liberal Arts Alumni Are Employed

Table 2. Skills Liberal Arts Education Best Helped Students Develop

Respondents selected up to three skills their liberal arts education best helped them develop.