Many students at St. Thomas University are probably wondering how they’ll get a job with a liberal arts degree. With fewer jobs and more debt, the idea of graduating can be frightening.
Barbara Hill, senior associate at the Center for International Initiatives, has worked at more than 68 institutions of higher education in the U.S. over the past decade and is a strong supporter of a liberal arts education. She spoke at the Global Trend in Higher Education Conference, at STU on the weekend.
“There’s nothing like crossing a border to give you a new perspective,” Hill said.
She says broad-based learning from liberal education is what we need. People want to know if the higher education degree is worth the money. For a four-year program at public university in the U.S. It would cost an average of $12,000 a year. For a two-year program it would be an average of $6,200, and for a four-year program at a private non-profit university the average is $23,800. These all include room and board. Then there’s the question of employability.
“The unemployment rate for all four-year graduates is 4.5 per cent. For recent graduates it is a little higher because of the downturn in the economy. It’s 6.8 per cent. But for recent graduates trying to work with only a high school diploma, the unemployment rate is 24 per cent.”
Hill argues a liberal arts degree can provide similar salaries to science or technical degrees. When comparing starting salaries, jobs in the humanities field have lower salaries than others, but this is only for a short time.
“Some of the lowest beginning salaries are in teaching, are in the fine arts, are in social work, are in a number of things that are necessary for us in our civic enterprises. What’s more complicated is that if you measure these same professions mid-career, there was some indication that those who study in the humanities have higher salaries, or at least catch up to the IT people, by mid-career.”
One of STU’s big selling points is critical thinking or thinking for yourself. Hill believes this is important, and says students need to have adaptive and problem-solving skills too.
She touched on the importance of internationalism in post-secondary education. Funding has increased for students to study abroad, but they don’t always come back as “globally aware” as some institutions hope.
International students can pay two to three times the amount of tuition as domestic students. She emphasized the need to generate revenue, but to have a moral purpose about how you treat international students.
There’s been a steady decline in foreign language programs in the U.S., which makes students more inclined to travel to English speaking countries.
“Higher education seems to be encouraging students to be monolingual.”
She said 68 per cent of institutions in the U.S. are considering international background and experience when hiring faculty in fields that aren’t explicitly international.
She also said it’s important to integrate international students with domestic students, but there has been little increase in support for the types of services they need. She believes internationalizing universities and colleges would help everyone understand their place in a global context.
“I would encourage institutions to think of them as students first and remember that international is the adjective. Like all students they come in with different needs, but to treat them separately like many institutions do tends to encourage them to hang out with each other.”
“And if a lot of your students are not going to study abroad, the only ways they’re going to get a global perspective, will be in their classrooms or in the active engagement with people from other cultures.”
