Author: Ken Anselment

What do employers really want from college grads?

Score one more for the liberal arts.

In a story last week on Marketplace (a business-oriented American Public Media radio show that runs daily on NPR), we were presented with yet another argument for why the liberal arts and sciences are as relevant as ever in this economy.

The story centers on the results of a survey conducted by Maguire & Associates on behalf of Marketplace and The Chronicle of Higher Education. They contacted 700 employers who express general frustration with how colleges are preparing their students for the world of work: “Nearly a third said colleges are doing a ‘fair’ to ‘poor’ job of producing ‘successful employees.’ Despite persistently high unemployment, more than half of the employers said they had trouble finding qualified candidates for job openings.”

And what makes a “successful employee,” at least among those 700 employers in the survey group? (SPOILER: The answer is the kind that makes those of us who work at liberal arts colleges feel even more confident that what we offer is relevant, practical, and necessary. [Prospective students and parents, please take note.])

“We find that a lot of people, and not just new college grads, people that are coming from a career, aren’t getting that skill set,” Boyes [an employer interviewed in the story] says. “How you put an idea forward, and how do you support it, how do you build it, how do you put the facts behind it? All of those things are really critical.”

Boyes sounds like a lot of the employers who responded to our survey. More than half of them said they have trouble finding qualified people for job openings. They said recent grads too often don’t know how to communicate effectively. And they have trouble adapting, problem solving and making decisions – things employers say they should have learned in college.

That’s why everyone Boyes hires goes through a year-long training program. “The company puts probably about a quarter of a million dollars into every single new hire,” Boyes says. “But that’s the kind of value that we get out of it.”

The training covers basics – like how to write an effective business document – and throws in some philosophy and history

“We ask people to read Cato the Elder,” Boyes says. “We ask people to read Suetonius.”

Jobseekers, take note: you better brush up on your on your early Roman history.

“We do that because we ask them to look at the process – the abstract process – of organizing ideas,” Boyes says.

Sounds a lot like an argument for liberal arts education, at a time when more students are being told to study science and technology as a path to a career. Maguire Associates, the firm that conducted the survey, says the findings suggest colleges should break down the “false dichotomy of liberal arts and career development,” saying they’re “intrinsically linked.”

Or, as Boyes puts it: “We don’t need mono-focused people. We need well-rounded people.” And that’s from a tech employer.

Music to our ears. (Pun intended. If you don’t get the pun, remember that we have a conservatory of music paired with our college of liberal arts and sciences.)

 

“You’re talking rot!”(or, “Why the Liberal Arts and Sciences Still Matter”, Part 2)

Yesterday, we left you with a cliffhanger. Today, the start of an answer.

It has always been the particular challenge of a liberal arts and sciences program to answer the question “What can you do with it?” The question has become increasingly pointed in an economy that continues continues to sputter, joblessness remains woefully high, and, college costs continue to rise. The problem has been exacerbated by legislators (Democrats and Republicans alike) that often equate “college education” with “professional preparation”.  The Obama administration’s drive to put the United States back on top of the list of nations with the highest percentages of college degree holders by 2020 illustrates this. (We’re not even in the top 10, according to the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development.)

But there’s more to college education and professional preparation than just holding a degree.

It is necessary to have a well-trained, technically proficient citizenry. We need engineers, scientists, accountants, developers and others who can solve problems. But we also need people in these professions to be able to explain to others how they solved the problems. More important they need to teach others how to solve them for themselves. Purely vocational training likely will not get you all the way there. Strong writing, speaking and thinking skills can separate the merely good problem-solver from the great ones.

But limiting the discussion to the world of work is only part of the story. What of our lives outside our jobs?

What about being an informed citizen, one who can say not only what she believes, but make a compelling case for why she believes it?

What about being a critical consumer of information, one who is less likely to believe something just because it’s coming from an “authority,” like a newspaper, a news program, a blog, a politician, or even a professor.

The liberal arts and sciences can play an important role in developing the whole person—professionally and personally.

In a landmark study, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa attempt to address a variety of questions about the amount and type of learning occurring in American colleges, based on a five-year longitudinal study of 2,300 students on 24 diverse campuses. One of the questions they address—are students improving their critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills during college?—finds a positive correlation between academic rigor and the amount of gains seen in the development of this set of skills. Their Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) used performance tasks and holistic assessments (instead of surveys) to measure not only what students know, but what they don’t know.

In the study, students in the liberal arts and sciences fared far better than their peers in professional programs like business, engineering, communications, education and health. One of their hypotheses, according to Arum at a recent address to more than 100 college enrollment officials, is that the traditional arts and sciences is where the most academic rigor and, as a result, the most learning occurs, largely because of their heavier requirements for reading, writing, and intensive study—three activities that tend to be more independent endeavors. The study finds that students who spent, on average, more hours of independent study per week during college fared far better than those who spent, on average more hours in group study with peers during their college careers.

An interesting side note to the study is that those students who spent more time studying independently were also far more likely to read print or online news daily, and to discuss politics and public affairs.

So back to that question: “What can you do with the liberal arts and sciences?”

In an uncertain world, where the commonplace idea is that the most in-demand jobs ten years from now don’t yet exist, being a nimble, flexible, adaptive learner equipped with finely tuned reading, writing, speaking and thinking skills can be advantageous. A liberal arts and sciences curriculum can prepare you for your first job (though vocational experiences like internships will undoubtedly enhance that preparation). Perhaps more important, a liberal arts and sciences curriculum should prepare you for all of the jobs you’ll have after that.

And lest we pigeonhole ourselves merely as workers, a liberal arts and sciences curriculum can broaden the skills essential to a meaningful life outside the world of work. Such as being able to detect when a “man is talking rot.”

Or, as Andrew Delbanco, cultural critic and author of College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be, said in an address in 2012: “You’re going to spend the rest of your life inside your head. You may as well make it an interesting place to be.”

“You’re talking rot!” (Why the Liberal Arts and Sciences Still Matter)

Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.

—John Alexander Smith, 1914

Even though it was more than a century ago when John Alexander Smith, a University of Oxford professor of moral philosophy, opened his course with this counterintuitive utterance, the core of his message is as essential today as it was not only then, but for centuries before that.

Today you’ll find few people calling out someone for “talking rot”. (Using an anachronism like that is a quick way to get an eye-roll.) However, the ability to identify shaded truth, logical fallacies, slanted rhetoric, even demagoguery, or—to quote so many college admissions publications—the ability to “think critically” remains one of the most important things an education should develop and sharpen.

It’s something liberal arts and sciences programs—either liberal arts colleges (like Lawrence University or Williams College) or liberal arts core curricula at some comprehensive universities (like Marquette or Notre Dame)—have been doing for generations.

But the liberal arts had been around long before these academic upstarts started delivering them. Since the time of the Roman Empire, the liberal arts were those things studied by free persons—grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, music, astronomy.

You might recognize their allegorized images (below) from their class picture, painted in the late 16th century by Flemish painter, Maarten de Vos.

Today’s liberal arts and sciences typically comprise the arts and humanities (like literature, languages, philosophy, history, fine/performing arts) and sciences (math, natural and social science).

A liberal arts and sciences education tests our ability to investigate and understand the nature of an organism, the application of a theory, the behavior of a crowd, the principles of a political system, the meaning of a poem, the causes of an event, the consequences of an argument, or the composition of a symphony. They help us see the complexity of both/and, rather than either/or.

At its best, the study of the liberal arts and sciences develops the abilities to find similarities among dissimilar things, common ground among the uncommon, meaning in the midst of meaninglessness. It can transform one—as David Burrows, provost of Lawrence University, often says—from “merely reflecting the light of others to generating one’s own light.”

“Sure. That’s the nice stuff you find in college admissions brochures,” people will often challenge. “But will it help you get a job?”

We’ll take up that challenge tomorrow. (Rest assured; we have an answer.)

Note: A long (really long) version of this appeared in an article I wrote for the American Society of Quality in June 2011. IHRTLUHC on myself, I suppose.

Ready to make your deposit online, only to be thwarted by internet-dwelling gremlins?

We hear that from time to time.

If you are ready to join the Lawrence community for the coming fall, and wish to pay your $400 tuition deposit online, you might find the following steps helpful to guide you:

  • Log into your Voyager account.
  • Select the link, Your Account, and you will be whisked off to the “Student Account Online” page. [If prompted to log in again, use the same information you used to log into your Voyager account.]
  • Once you successfully get into the Student Account Online, you will see a page that looks like this (presumably without all the same apps on the toolbar):

  • On this page, find the Items for Purchase box. It’s the third box down in the left column.
  • Select Tuition Deposit, and you’ll get to a page that looks like this:

  • Select Accept Admission $400 (we’re thinking positively here).
  • Select Add to Shopping Cart
  • The rest should be familiar to you if you’ve conducted a credit card transaction online.
  • Note: if you find the $11 service charge distasteful (we’re not too thrilled about it ourselves), you can either
    • submit through the same system the e-check/electronic funds transfer, for which there is no fee (woohoo!)
    • submit your deposit the good old-fashioned way by dropping (1) a check along with your (2) confirmation of enrollment card into the Business Reply Mail envelope we sent with your offer of admission.

Rest assured that Lawrence University is way more user-friendly than this process might otherwise suggest.

However you confirm your enrollment at Lawrence, just know that we’ll be delighted, thrilled, overjoyed, jazzed, [insert your own status here], that you have.
Welcome to Lawrence!

 

If you are waiting for access to your Voyager account…

You may have received a letter from our financial aid office encouraging you to apply for financial aid, and giving you a bunch of instructions about how to use your Voyager account to track your financial aid documents.

Many of you—dutiful future Lawrentians that you are—have followed our instructions only to find yourself unable to log in. Below is a summary statement of how we have heard this makes you feel:

Here’s the good news (sort of): It’s not you; it’s us.

We are still in the process of building user profiles for all of our applicants so they can use Voyager, a process that will be complete in the next couple of weeks.*

Once that process is complete, we will send you—via snail mail—your username and password.You can, however, still start the financial aid application process while you wait for your Voyager access to become available. Our priority deadline to apply for financial aid is March 1.

If you have questions about this, or need to know right now whether we have your financial aid documents, please connect with your Lawrence admissions counselor.

Honestly, get in touch with us. We’re happy to help.

*If you’re interested in technical stuff, we are exporting files from our admission system to our student record system. You’d think that would be a quick process, but when we’re dealing with thousands of applications and student records, you want to be more than 100% certain that all the data are right. We wouldn’t want to send the wrong information to the wrong people.

(Sad face designed by Tobias F. Wolf, from The Noun Project.)