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Career Skills and the Liberal Arts

February 29th, 2016

Liberal arts graduates have highly developed analytical, reasoning and communication skills and are poised to adapt to new developments over the course of their lives. In effect, the liberal arts teach us how to learn in a variety of spheres … which our fast-changing world demands.

Today’s article link sheds light on how colleges are pairing tangible skills with the breadth and depth of the liberal arts, using Bates College in Maine as a primary example. With the liberal arts under attack by so many, more liberal arts colleges are likely to take similar routes, focusing increasingly on employability. That’s a very good thing!

Article published February 23, 2016

Written by: Carl Straumsheim

Computer science might not be the first field that springs to mind when thinking of the liberal arts, but at some colleges, interdisciplinary computing is seen as one way to connect the department to other disciplines on campus.

Bates College, a liberal arts college in Maine, may be the most recent example. The college, which enrolls about 2,000 students, doesn’t offer anything resembling a computer science program — not even a concentration. Given the chance to create one from scratch, the college will in 2017 introduce digital and computational studies, an interdisciplinary program that fits the label of neither computer science nor digital humanities.

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