Future Leaders Have Lessons to Learn in College
What a liberal arts education gives you is growing more valuable, not less.
Fortune reports.
What Future Leaders Need to Learn in College
To all the brand new college graduates who majored in a liberal arts field, I have a message: If you want to be a leader, you did the right thing.
This is a controversial message at a time when every village and town seems to be offering coding classes for kindergarteners and America’s dearth of STEM majors is conventionally viewed as a serious problem. None of that is wrong. Coding is becoming the literacy of the modern economy, and everyone should be conversant with it. Companies in energy, IT, and other fields want to hire more good STEM majors than they can find; of course they want a larger supply. Along the way, liberal arts have become desperately uncool except among a band of earnest evangelists who argue that it’s a solid foundation for whatever else a young person may want to do.
Comments
First off, I wish people would stop using “the liberal arts” to describe humanities majors. Liberal arts colleges and universities have STEM, Law, and Business degree-conferring programs as well.
The term “liberal arts majors” is not incorrect because it is very generic, but it falsely invokes the notion that liberal arts institutions only confer those degrees.
Second, the problem with the humanities majors is that they are still super-saturating their workforce. Not everyone can be a leader and the chances to become one are few and far between. By sheer numbers, many will fail taking this route, and many could easily misconstrue this advice to mean that they can morph into a leader by majoring in one of these programs. Leadership is part innate and part learned, in my opinion. Even some of the learning takes place in critical years before college; we have a leadership program at our college and 90% of the graduates will never be leaders (and shouldn’t be!).