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Study International .Com | [T]he typical skills earned from humanities and social sciences degrees will be the key employment in the future. The World Economic Forum’s report isn’t the only publication stating this. Research backs up this projection too. According to researchers at the British Academy, the skills in demand from employers were the same as those developed by studying arts, humanities and social science (AHSS); namely, communication and collaboration, research and analysis, and independence and adaptability. An earlier study by Oxford University in 2013, which looked into the destinations of English, History, Philosophy, Classics and Modern Languages graduates, found around one-fifth were employed in key economic growth sectors of finance, media, legal services and management by the end of the period. Surveying the employment history of 11,000 graduates, it found the number of graduates employed in these sectors rose substantially over the period. | Link |
CNBC | While digital skills like coding and data science are important, it's the soft skills — a strong work ethic; self-motivation; social, emotional and leadership skills; and holistic skills (like problem-finding) that are truly the key components for success in the modern economy. By investing in liberal arts graduates, we gain people with human-centered skills who can approach problems in entirely new ways, contributing to out-of-the-box thinking in a digital age. Liberal arts graduates bring a depth and breadth of knowledge from across the humanities and social sciences that complement the hard skills of engineers and data scientists. And in a world that increasingly interacts with technology in every facet of daily life, it's increasingly important that technology reflects the world around us. | Link |
Economic Modeling | Validating the liberal arts programs internally was a win, but his success wouldn’t mean much unless he could communicate the programs’ value to current and prospective students. This is true for every college. It is especially true for Saddleback, located just southeast of Los Angeles. The region’s strong economy, low unemployment, and high cost of living put the pressure on institutions to prove gainful employment. Facing a plethora of career options that could earn $100-200K salaries, students aren’t easily enticed by programs that don’t appear to lead anywhere special. So Dominguez’s next task was to make sure current and prospective students knew the value of Saddleback’s liberal arts programs. Thanks to Dominguez’s data, college counselors can now tell students about the wide world of career options if they go into liberal arts. The website’s liberal arts page also features handy, downloadable career fliers showing pathway options for program areas such as English, humanities, journalism, and philosophy. | Link |
EMSI Research | Sales, marketing, management, and business and financial analysis were careers common to every major, typically appearing as a top-10 outcome. These common areas contradict the idea of drastically different outcomes for different degrees. In fact, humanities graduates and business graduates go into many of the same fields in large numbers—and a significant segment of STEM majors go into these fields a | Link |
EMSI Research | Education isn't as deterministic of our work as we might believe. According to a 2018 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, only 27% of college graduates work in a field related to their major.1 Our analysis finds that while the few top careers for each program type are usually linear ( IT —› software development, etc.), the majority of graduates’ outcomes are dispersed widely among many different careers. | Link |
Mellon Foundation | Carroll and Erkut 2009 examine the impact of additional educational expenditures on tax revenues and contributions to programs such as social security and Medicare, public expenditures on a variety of programs, and spending on prisons and jails. They conclude that increased educational attainment (including a college degree versus some college) yields significant net economic benefits to taxpayers. | Link |
Inside Higher Ed | "We moved toward the guided pathways model and I feel strongly that in order for that to work you need advisers working on particular structures to ensure students have a guidepost and a clear sense of where they're going," said Donald Generals, president of the Philadelphia college, adding that the college didn't use new dollars to hire the advisers but shifted money from vacant positions. He declined to disclose how much the shift cost. | Link |
CCSSE | New challenges require advisors to have broader skill sets. Advisors increasingly must, for example: | Link |
BYU Newsletter | Alumni of the liberal arts not only have excellent career prospects, but earning potential as well. “At peak earning ages, liberal arts majors surpass people in pre-professional degrees, in part because they are more likely to have graduate degrees. After people who focused on the social sciences and humanities as undergraduates attend graduate school, they may end up working as lawyers or professors, which are high-paying professions.” (Five Thirty-Eight) | Link |
BYU Newsletter | One-third of Fortune 500 CEOs have liberal arts degrees; admissions officers from top business, law and medical schools are said to prefer liberal arts majors; and billionaire entrepreneur and tech investor Mark Cuban recently predicted that “there’s going to be a greater demand in 10 years for liberal arts majors than . . . for programming majors and maybe even engineering.” (Business Insider) Why? Innovation comes at the intersection of disciplines; the most successful students and professionals can successfully integrate education and experience. When students can choose a major in an area they are passionate about, and supplement it with a minor or coursework in another discipline, they dramatically increase their ability to function at this intersection. Phil Gardner, Director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University, suggests that a narrow set of specialized skills is no longer sufficient for today’s jobs. | Link |
Wall Street Journal Blog | Looking back at the tech teams that I’ve built at my companies, it’s evident that individuals with liberal arts degrees are by far the sharpest, best-performing software developers and technology leaders. Often these modern techies have degrees in philosophy, history, and music – even political science, which was my degree. How can this be? It’s very simple. A well-rounded liberal arts degree establishes a foundation of critical thinking. Critical thinkers can accomplish anything. Critical thinkers can master French, Ruby on Rails, Python or whatever future language comes their way. A critical thinker is a self-learning machine that is not constrained by memorizing commands or syntax. | Link |
Forbes | "I personally think there's going to be a greater demand in 10 years for liberal arts majors than there were for programming majors and maybe even engineering," he said. "When the data is all being spit out for you for you, options are being spit out for you, you need a different perspective in order to have a different view of the data." | Link |
AAC&U News Release | Nearly all those surveyed (93 percent) agree that “a candidate’s demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than their undergraduate major.” “Employers are highly focused on innovation as critical to the success of their companies, and they report that the challenges their employees face today are more complex and require a broader skill set than in the past. Notably, employers indicate that they prioritize critical thinking, communication, and complex problem-solving skills over a job candidate’s major field of study when making hiring decisions.” | Link |
[W]hile science, engineering, and pre-professional grads earn more out of the gate, their advantages decrease over time (other analyses have found the same thing). Perhaps more importantly, using data from Harvard's Equality of Opportunity Project, they also show that liberal arts degrees do nearly as well as more practical degrees at lifting up students from poorer backgrounds. | Link | |
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