How Important Do You Find a Liberal Arts Education?
Why Report the Liberal Arts?
What is a Liberal Arts Teaching?
Working towards a baccalaureate degree in the Liberal Arts or Sciences involves taking courses in what are traditionally referred to as the "Liberal" Arts. This means that your courses volition exist in general areas of study--philosophy, mathematics, literature, history, economics, languages, and then on--rather than in practical or specialized fields.
A Liberal Arts education is non intended to train you for a specific job, though it does prepare you for the world of work past providing you with an invaluable set of employability skills, including the ability to think for yourself, the skills to communicate effectively, and the capacity for lifelong learning.
What Will I Report every bit Part of a Liberal Arts Education?
You volition study a multifariousness of subjects, looking at the world and its people from various points of view. Yous will learn about ideas and behavior that have guided human beings and shaped civilizations for thousands of years. Yous'll enquire yourself questions like:
- What does it mean to exist man?
- What have humans washed, thought virtually, and felt?
- What is truth and dazzler, and what are their value to life?
- How have we been shaped by, and how take we shaped, our concrete and natural environs?
- What skills, methods or techniques can be used to examine the world and its people?
A Liberal Arts education is by nature broad and various, rather than narrow and specialized. Choosing courses from many disciplines gives you a broad and useful education.
In the starting time yr, a Liberal Arts student normally takes a variety of introductory courses. This non simply gives you a wide knowledge of subjects but helps you to choose certain areas for farther study. In almost cases, you volition be encouraged to take courses in at to the lowest degree some of the major categories inside the Liberal Arts:
- Humanities (English language Literature, Strange Languages, History, Philosophy)
- Social Sciences (Black Studies, Economics, Geography, Political Science, Sociology)
- Artistic Liberal Arts (Fine Fine art, Theatre, Speech, Creative Writing)
- Sciences (Biology, Chemical science, Physics, Math)
Liberal Arts studies at UNO also requires students to choose a major - a specific group of thematically-linked courses. Past concentrating on a given field of study, whatever it may be, you will go across the mere surface of things and proceeds a solid grasp of the core textile in a given expanse.
Why Should I Pursue a Liberal Arts Education?
This is the large question: Why Liberal Arts? Why not Technology? Or Nursing? Or Informatics? At that place are numerous ways to answer this question, and ultimately the utility of any answer will depend upon your ain circumstances.
For you, studies in the Liberal Arts may provide the necessary practical skills that you volition apply on the job; or they may prepare you to movement on to a graduate or professional schoolhouse. For others, the primal value of a Liberal Arts teaching may exist the personal satisfaction and fulfillment that studying philosophy or fine art makes possible. Still others will be able to excel in today'south global business world considering the foreign language skills developed in their Liberal Arts education gave them an important edge.
Indeed, the reasons for pursuing a Liberal Arts education are as many as the number of potential students. What you need to enquire is what you lot want to get out of a postsecondary instruction. If yous desire to get a solid, broadly-based, general didactics which will improve your analytical, advice and learning abilities, then the Liberal Arts may be for you.
What About Skills Preparation?
Yous have probably heard a lot of talk lately almost how important it is to get the proper "skills set up" so that you tin can be immediately attractive to an employer. Some think that the goal of a postsecondary didactics should be to provide you with equally much specific training equally possible before you make it on the job, thus relieving potential employers of the costs and risks associated with hiring untrained workers.
In light of this perception, many students balk at taking general Liberal Arts courses and choose instead to focus narrowly on a vocational or professional person area of study. This tin can be an fantabulous choice. There are many rewarding and fulfilling careers that i can pursue with the aid of a first-course vocational or career training program. But brand certain that you are making your educational choices for the right reasons—those that are best for you lot. If you lot are shying away from Liberal Arts courses because you recollect that you need training in specific skills to get a job, you may be mistaken.
First, a Liberal Arts education does provide y'all with tangible, practical skills that employers value highly. What's more than, you will obtain skills and knowledge that are never obsolete. The world is changing chop-chop and there may be a danger in preparing yourself too narrowly to fit a certain slot that may non even exist by the time you get into the job market place. Meanwhile, the underlying skills, abilities and attributes fostered in the Liberal Arts are always relevant.
What Skills Volition I Learn by Taking Liberal Arts Courses?
The list of skills, abilities, capacities and attributes normally associated with a Liberal Arts teaching includes, but is not limited to, the following:
- Belittling and knowledge-building skills
- Evaluative and disquisitional thinking skills
- Creative thinking skills
- Effective oral and written communication skills
- Disquisitional and reflective reading skills
- Problem solving and design intelligence skills
- Numerical skills
- Synthesis skills and the ability to express the results of assay and evaluation
- Ability to pose meaningful questions that advance understanding and noesis
- Power to conduct research and organize material effectively
- Information literacy and other skills associated with learning how to learn
- Independent judgment and ethical decision-making
- Ability to encounter goals, manage fourth dimension, and complete a project successfully
- Self-confidence and self-understanding
- Power to cooperate with others and work in teams
- Sensitivity to individuals and tolerance of cultural differences
- Ability to use sensitive and technical equipment
- Informed openness to new information technologies
Where Can a Liberal Arts Education Take Me?
A Liberal Arts degree prepares you for hundreds of careers. Your opportunities are limited only by your imagination, your interests and your willingness to devote time and free energy to your piece of work. Of course, a Liberal Arts degree can likewise take you to the top graduate and professional schools. Liberal Arts courses are oftentimes required for anyone who pursues a professional person degree, and a high per centum of Liberal Arts graduates go on to accept further education. This is not surprising, since the Liberal Arts serve every bit a foundation for almost vocational or professional studies at the university. For instance, programs in accounting, business, education, journalism, and police force are built upon the knowledge and skills that come up from fields that make upwardly the Liberal Arts. Accounting and business depend upon mathematics and economics; teaching derives from psychology and sociology; journalism requires a knowledge of English language and history; and police builds upon political science and philosophy.
Volition a Liberal Arts Didactics Brand Me a Better Person?
A Liberal Arts education will enhance your knowledge and improve your understanding of the world and its people. Many say that cognition leads to wise activeness, perhaps fifty-fifty to goodness. Thus, a Liberal Arts education may aid you to perceive and to sympathise your shortcomings, allowing you to become a amend citizen, friend, spouse, parent, human.
Liberal Arts courses often enable students to reach beyond their own experiences and imagine worlds far distant in fourth dimension and space. By opening your optics, ears and heed, a skillful Liberal Arts education can strengthen in you lot the virtues of tolerance, sympathy, and respect for others. A Liberal Arts educational activity will equip you to participate effectively in your community. It tin can also help you to appoint in the controversies of our time--whether nearly the environment, cultural diversity, social justice, indigenous strife, gender relations or foreign policy.
Can a Liberal Arts Education Make Me Happy?
It would exist ridiculous to make any promises of a carefree future, but a Liberal Arts pedagogy tin contribute to your happiness. Studies in the humanities offer an obvious preparation for leisure and life beyond the world of work. A skilful Liberal Arts instruction increases your chapters to understand and relish humanity's cultural and scientific achievements. It also contributes to the pleasance you can go from the world around you. Studies in your Liberal Arts program can increase your awareness and appreciation of literature, music, personality, nature, art, symbolism, wit, historical innuendo or figurative language.
But more than than that, a good general education allows you to see things whole, to provide a context for seemingly meaningless or isolated events. This may sound similar an abstract do good, but it is just this orientation for knowledge that might reduce the confusion and frustration that comes from being unable to put into context an event, decision or phenomenon that you encounter in your daily life. Perchance this helps explain, to a certain extent, why studies consistently bear witness that educated people have, statistically, happier relationships, lower rates of depression, less loneliness, and a higher degree of satisfaction with life.
Just is a Liberal Arts Degree Worth It in Today's High-Tech World?
A Liberal Arts degree is valuable in itself, just as well teaches many of the skills and abilities that are needed in the contemporary workplace. That is why managers in concern, industry and authorities appreciate the value of a Liberal Arts degree in potential employees. They recognize the importance of what are oftentimes called "employability skills"--reading, writing, listening, speaking effectively, knowledge of language, critical thinking, problem-solving, bones numeracy, information literacy and the capacity to continue to larn for life--and know that UNO Liberal Arts programs have always concentrated on simply these skills. Students, besides, understand that Liberal Arts Faculties tend to practice the best job in developing these general employability skills. That is 1 of the reasons that students continue to vote with their feet by enrolling in Liberal Arts programs in high numbers.
Notwithstanding, at that place is a perception out at that place that technical trainees get high wage jobs in their fields while Liberal Arts graduates face loftier unemployment or can find only low wage jobs that exercise not utilize their university training. A common stereotype portrays the poor Liberal Arts grad stuck in a dead-finish McJob. In fact, this is a gross misrepresentation of labor market reality. More ever, an undergraduate higher didactics is a sound investment. Recent studies in both the U.S. and Canada have demonstrated that a high level of pedagogy translates into college income over a person'south lifetime. These studies show that almost university graduates, including those with Liberal Arts degrees, have lower unemployment rates and college lifetime earnings than people with just high school diplomas or technical/vocational credentials.
But in that location is more than to it than a simple link betwixt teaching and income. A contempo report past the System for Economical Cooperation and Development (OECD) points to what information technology calls "literacy skills" every bit the key gene that pays off in whatever task. Literacy, in this sense, involves the types of skills that are fostered in Liberal Arts programs: the ability to understand and utilise prose, to analyze documents, and to work with numbers. The written report, entitled Literacy Skills for the Knowledge Gild, contains information comparing the literacy skills of people in 12 countries. It finds that the ability to comprehend and utilize words and figures plays a potent part in determining wages, particularly in countries like Canada and the U.s.. It is worth noting, withal, that low literacy rates can be establish even in people with higher instruction. The report points out that your educational credentials may get you a task in the outset place, but having strong literacy skills will make y'all the kind of productive and useful employee who rises through the ranks. Moreover, workers with high literacy skills tin suit more easily to changing circumstances, making them less vulnerable to unemployment and more likely to be high income earners. In a quickly changing, data-based economy, the benefits of literacy cannot exist overestimated.
What Should I Exercise?
Just you tin can know what is all-time for you at this time in your life. However, yous should explore all of your opportunities, including a Liberal Arts instruction. Talk to your advisor. Speak with friends, relatives or co-workers about their educational experiences. Read upwardly on the trends and developments that might influence your decision. Admissions officers can assist you go into the areas of your choice. And fiscal aid or awards officers tin can advise you lot on how to access scholarships or student loans.
Whatever y'all exercise, don't let opportunities pass you lot past because yous accept failed to become the material you demand to make an informed choice. But recall, a postsecondary education can exist expensive. Information technology is a lot of piece of work. And it represents a major investment of fourth dimension and energy. And so don't waste your money or your time doing something that y'all really don't want to do. You volition be happier and more likely to succeed if you follow your heart, do any you do for your own reasons, and look at a postsecondary education for what it is: an opportunity for yous to grow and develop as a human.
Source: https://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-arts-and-sciences/academic-advising-center/choosing-a-major/liberal-arts.php
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