Interesting piece in today's NY Times called New Course for Liberal Arts: Intro to Job Market by Karen Arenson about offering more career-oriented courses to students.
Amherst of course, isn't following that trend:
Anthony Marx, the president of Amherst College, said that if students had more time they should "go deeper into the liberal arts, because that is the seed corn of an intellectual life and informed citizenship.""To dilute the power of the liberal arts with premature professionalism will deprive our society of the thoughtful leadership it needs," Mr. Marx added.
When I was at Amherst one of the big issues was whether students could work toward their teaching credential while at school, so that they could graduate ready to get teaching jobs.
I just thought it was interesting, particularly since my sister seems to want to be a philosphy major (we'll see if that sticks, I thought I wanted to be an American Studies major until I got there) and since I look back and feel like I took all the wrong courses when I was there... I'd definitely take less computer science and math and more English and History if I was doing it again... But I'm not sure a different set of classes will help people in this job market...
Posted by Emily at June 19, 2004 07:39 AM