My name is Rob Turchick, a rising senior studying English and Vice President of the Liberal Arts Undergraduate Council. I write today what will be the first blog in a series of posts focused on the importance of higher education; more specifically, a liberal arts education. Recent budget cuts and (what seemed like a flurry of) disbanded majors, such as Religious Studies, have many questioning the value of the liberal arts, as well as the direction that higher education is taking. Through this series of posts, we will hear what members of Penn State’s liberal arts community have to say.

At the close of the 2011 spring semester, Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts hosted a conference that served to highlight a crisis in the liberal arts, and to identify potential solutions. Personally, I think our outgoing LAUC President Geoff Halberstadt summed up the problem in question best in a blog post titled “Crisis in the Liberal Arts: Cynical Faculty”:

“The problem I see lies in the turning away from a liberal arts education, and, to me at the very least, a repudiation of the values that education offers its students.”

A liberal arts education instills in all of its students leadership, understanding, and ethics, and has been the foundation of higher education since its inception. It is becoming more apparent, especially now with constricting monetary limitations, that these qualities are being devalued by politicians and the public alike. A recent PEW study, “Is College Worth It?”, reported that 57% of Americans believe that the higher education system in the U.S. fails to give students good value for the money that they dish out for college. Furthermore, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices will have you believe that “preparing a state’s work force for 21st-century jobs” will require the governors to wean colleges and universities from their “emphasis on broad liberal-arts education” (see Carol Schneider’s article “Degrees for What Jobs?’ Wrong Question, Wrong Answers” for more information). It seems to me that higher education as a whole is being criticized, and the liberal arts are sure to receive the heaviest critical blow.

This should be alarming to the entire nation, not just liberal arts students, teachers, or administrators. Liberal arts students consistently perform astronomically better than students in other areas of study in reading, writing, and analytical thinking. For some reason, these skills are being kicked to the curb in exchange for extremely narrow fields of study which have short term pay offs, but give students no real room to grow. The liberal arts provide the best avenue for personal growth and a better understanding of the world we live in, giving its students a foundation for success in any field of work. When did we begin thinking of education in terms of dollar signs and pay offs? A few other questions must be addressed, as well. How do the liberal arts contribute to society? Why does higher education have a bad name with the majority of the American public? How can we reverse these beliefs?

We are very fortunate to also be hearing from former LAUC President Sam Loewner in the very near future, who will offer his own insight into how we might measure the value of education. I implore everyone to follow along in a series of posts that will hopefully validate my belief that a liberal arts education is something to be celebrated and encourage.

I now invite everyone in the Penn State community to take part in this discussion. Please feel free to support or refute any ideas that I have put forth in the comments.