It’s tempting for students to study in preparation for a career rather than for the sake of learning. To a certain extent, this attitude makes sense. After all, what good is it to follow your academic and intellectual passions if there’s no way those passions can secure you a steady job or a spot in a graduate school once your four years are up? I’m sure for some students, this “problem” is no problem at all. Maybe they’re just really passionate about medicine or law or economics, or maybe they find themselves at their best when they’re coding or drafting a campaign statement. However, the career-focused bent in contemporary education also has the potential to become intellectually stifling. Rather than valuing education for education’s sake, we come to see our undergraduate years as a sort of training ground for 9 to 5 office jobs, an opportunity to build a digestible resumé for corporate America. Consequently, we might feel pressured to lay aside our “less-practical” passions in pursuit of a more marketable education. But it doesn’t have to work this way! We can use our undergraduate years as an opportunity to explore diverse intellectual interests, in both “practical” and “impractical” fields, without sacrificing our opportunities for post-graduate employment.
Harvard is technically a liberal arts college, but what exactly does that entail? According to the College’s academics page, “the liberal arts & sciences offer a broad intellectual foundation for the tools to think critically, reason analytically and write clearly.” The goal is not to prepare students for a specific career or sector of the job market using ultra-specific, technical instruction. Instead, liberal arts colleges like Harvard seek to acquaint students with a wide variety of methodologies and theoretical tools to enable graduates to approach and solve complex, multifaceted problems. This is why Harvard doesn’t have pre-professional concentrations like business or marketing or nursing, and places so much emphasis on the importance of the General Education curriculum.
Despite Harvard’s liberal arts orientation, a good proportion of students continue to perceive their undergraduate years as preparation for their future careers. This is evidenced in part by data on the popularity of certain concentrations. According to the Harvard Crimson, concentrations such as economics, computer science, and government that are more immediately applicable to occupations, and thus more immediately financially rewarding, continue to lead in popularity. Conversely, the number of concentrators in humanities-based fields have been steadily declining since 2013. It’s possible that we Gen-Zers are just absolutely in love with economic theory and coding. However, it is also possible that we have increasing anxiety about our job prospects as automation increases and the job market dwindles or at least continues to shift to different sectors.
But saying that a degree in economics or applied math is more practical or likely to land you a job than a degree in the humanities assumes that an employer cares about your concentration at all which, often, isn’t the case. According to an article from Forbes, employers tend to focus more on soft skills (such as writing and critical thinking) and whether you have a college degree rather than the specific field that degree is in. That’s not to say that there aren’t fields, such as medicine or engineering, where your undergraduate course of study is important and highly scrutinized. However, it seems that those fields are the exception rather than the rule.
What we might focus on instead of the “brand” of our concentration are the questions it enables us to ask, the skills it helps us build, and the interventions it allows us to make in the world around us. Thinking through the ways in which our education will help us grow as scholars and people is just as important as thinking about hard skills we might acquire from a field. There’s always a balance to be struck between concentrating in a field for the sake of landing a job and concentrating in a field purely because you’re passionate about the subject matter. It makes sense to be concerned about the job market, especially in a post-Covid era, but it also makes sense to focus your time and attention on a field or fields that intellectually excite you. Concentrating in art history or folklore and mythology won’t make you unemployable, and it won’t prevent you from acquiring soft skills that are valuable to an employer. Further, the opportunity to experiment with your education and try your hand at new fields and methodologies is a huge advantage that comes with attending a college with a liberal arts focus. In all likelihood, spending your undergraduate years fully invested in ideas that you find worthwhile will ultimately be much more impactful than concentrating in a field that you despise for the sake of securing a paycheck after graduation.
Cade Williams (cadewilliams@college.harvard.edu) wants you to at least graduate before sacrificing your mind to our corporate overlords.