Liberal Arts Institutions And Technical Schools example essay topic

Prompt: defend or refute that colleges are moving away from liberal arts Imagine a cardiovascular surgeon about to crack the sternum of a dying patient; tension is high while the clock of life ticks desperately slower and softer for the poor soul on the cold steel table that saw death the hour before. Is it logical that at that moment the purveyor of life is contemplating whether his freshmen philosophy class back at SMU has thoroughly prepared him for what he is about to do? Not likely. In higher learning institutions, liberal art classes like philosophy are not meant to be directly applied to one's life or career; however, they are structured and devised to be a strong base that the individual can expand upon through scientific learning and experience. This is precisely the reason colleges and universities require and place much emphasis on these classes; nevertheless, there has been a shift away from the liberal arts towards the direction of highly specialized areas of science and business because of their growing integration in everyday life.

Although people need a limited number of liberal arts classes to attain a basic understanding of ourselves and our evolution, state universities are aptly moving towards technical education, because, in this fast paced world, many people don't have the time or money to spend studying the humanities alone. With the advent of the internet, technical schools, and computers in general, jobs today are more specialized than ever before, and they will continue to increase in particularity, thus a purely liberal arts curriculum is very untimely. Most people take four years to attain a bachelor's degree of some kind and if they want a salary increase it requires at least two more years of graduate school before they can even think about entering the workplace. If people study only humanities for six of their most pivotal years of life, depending on their field of work, they may have a very small base of technical knowledge to utilize. Critics argue that "overemphasis on liberal arts can be detrimental to people" and ask "why doesn't one just go to technical school to get what they are really after?" It's because most jobs require the mental capacity to adapt as time passes.

This mental capacity is obtained through studies of the liberal arts. For example, one might ask: what possible use could an executive IT (information technology) Manager have for a class like history 2393: Japanese history? Based on the International Trade Administration's analysis on the foreign import market, Japan ranks fourth in the world for importing in the U. S (export. gov 1). Chances are that the American company the IT manager works for will deal with a Japanese company at some point. So, if he knows something about the way Japanese culture reacts to certain requests, he can devise a strategy for his company that maximizes profit when dealing with a particular Japanese company.

When viewed from this angle, the liberal arts courses seem more appealing to future members of the workforce. Graduates of Liberal Arts schools like Harvard and University of Chicago can demand such large salaries because employers know they have the mental capacity to learn what they need to as they go. In 2003, graduates of M.I.T.'s school of engineering earned an average starting salary of $50,500 (Mit. edu 1). Graduates of Harvard's school of arts and sciences started at $48,500 on average (Harvard. edu). Needless to say, graduates from both liberal arts institutions and technical schools are doing very well in their chosen fields. American society will continue its dependence on a healthy mix of liberal arts and technical education as long as it thrives as an economic model for the rest of the world and as long as students from almost every country come here for America's extraordinary educational system.

Bibliography

Export. gov. Home page. Trade Stats Express -National Trade Data. 25 Sept. 2004.
Harvard. edu. Home Page. Academic Information. 25 Sept. 2004.
Mit. edu. Home Page. M.I.T. Facts 2004.
25 Sept. 2004.