| Misp. # | Description (with brief quote & explanation) | Ungar’s Response (with quote/evidence & explanation) | Connections (to Jeffrey Scheuer or Others) – INCLUDE relevant quote(s) & explanation of relation to Ungar. |
| #1 | “A liberal-arts degree is a luxury that most families can no longer afford. “Career education” is what we now must focus on” | “Many families are indeed struggling, in the depths of the recession, to pay for their children’s college education. Yet one could argue that the traditional, well-rounded preparation that the liberal arts offer is a better investment than ever—that the future demands of citizenship will require not narrow technical or job-focused training, but rather a subtle understanding of the complex influences that shape the world we live in.” |
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| #2 | “College graduates are finding it harder to get good jobs with liberal-arts degrees. Who wants to hire somebody with an irrelevant major like philosophy or French?” | “A 2009 survey for the Association of American Colleges and Universities actually found that more than three-quarters of our nation’s employers recommend that collegebound students pursue a “liberal education.” An astounding 89 percent said they were looking for more emphasis on “the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing,” and almost as many urged the development of better “critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills.” Seventy percent said they were on the lookout for “the ability to innovate and be creative.”It is no surprise, then, that a growing number of corporations, including some in highly technical fields, are headed by people with liberal-arts degrees.”
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| #3 | “The liberal arts are particularly irrelevant for low-income and first-generation college students. They, more than their more-affluent peers, must focus on something more practical and marketable.” | “It is condescending to imply that those who have less cannot understand and appreciate the finer elements of knowledge—another way of saying, really, that the rich folks will do the important thinking, and the lower classes will simply carry out their ideas. That is just a form of prejudice and cannot be supported intellectually” “…But in my experience, it is often the people who are newest to certain ideas and approaches who are the most original and inventive in the discussion and application of those ideas. They catch up quickly. |
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| #4 | “One should not, in this day and age, study only the arts. The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—are where the action is.” | “Another term sometimes substituted for liberal arts, for the sake of clarity, is “the arts and sciences.” Thus, many universities have colleges, divisions, or schools of arts and sciences among their academic units.To be sure, there is much concern about whether America is keeping up with China and other rising economies in the STEM disciplines. No evidence suggests, however, that success in scientific and technical fields will be greater if it comes at the expense of a broad background in other areas of the liberal arts.”
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| #5 | “It’s the liberal Democrats who got this country into trouble in recent years, so it’s ridiculous to continue indoctrinating our young people with a liberal education.” | “A liberal education, as properly defined above, has nothing whatsoever to do with politics—except insofar as politics is one of the fields that students often pursue under its rubric. On the contrary, because of its inclusiveness and its respect for classical traditions, the liberal arts could properly be described as a conservative approach to preparation for life.” |
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| #6 | “America is the only country in the world that clings to such an old-fashioned form of postsecondary education as the liberal arts. Other countries, with more practical orientations, are running way ahead of us.” | “It is often difficult to explain the advantages of a liberal-arts education to people from other cultures, where it is common to specialize early. In many places, including Europe, the study of law or medicine often begins directly after high school, without any requirement to complete an undergraduate degree first. We should recognize, however, that a secondary education in some systems—say, those that follow the model of the German Gymnasium—often includes much that is left out of the typical high-school curriculum in America.” |
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| #7 | “The cost of American higher education is spiraling out of control, and liberal-arts colleges are becoming irrelevant because they are unable to register gains in productivity or to find innovative ways of doing things. “ | “There is plenty wrong with American higher education, including the runaway costs. But the problem of costs goes beyond individual institutions. Government at all levels has come nowhere close to supporting colleges in ways that allow them to provide the kind of access and affordability that’s needed. The best way to understand genuine national priorities is to follow the money, and by that standard, education is really not all that important to this country.” |
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