Snow is falling hard in Hanover, New Hampshire. It’s a January morning at Dartmouth College, and mobs of students are forming outside Loew Auditorium. The snowball fights and bonfires of Winter Carnival haven’t started yet; no campus outrage needs protesting at the moment. Yet for some reason, more than a hundred students are jostling one another. Backpacks are bumping into backpacks. Something is about to happen, and no one wants to miss out.
The reason for all this excitement: Classics professor Paul Christesen is about to start teaching his renowned introductory course Antiquity Today. He’s a broad-faced man in his late forties with a deep-seated interest in both the loftiest and earthiest elements of ancient Mediterranean culture. Over the next ten weeks, Christesen will march students through the significance of nomos and physis. He will explain how the Olympics began. He will discuss what it means for a nation to go to war, then and now. And he will spend an entire lecture exploring the sexual quirks of Roman citizens. In his hands, the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome aren’t ancient at all. They are reborn as pulsating, provocative counterpoints to the way we live today.
Students can’t get enough of it. In the winter of 2016, more than two hundred undergraduates signed up for Antiquity Today. Several dozen were turned away; there wasn’t room for them. When official enrollment settled at 159, Christesen found himself teaching one of Dartmouth’s most heavily attended classes. He had corralled the equivalent of 14 percent of the freshman student body.
Don’t let anyone tell you liberal arts education is dying. Standout professors are revitalizing the humanities and social sciences at colleges across America. At Harvard, philosophy professor Michael Sandel pulls as many as eleven hundred students into his wide-ranging course on justice. At the University of Texas, crowds form when English professor Elizabeth Richmond-Garza teaches Victorian literature. At schools such as the College of Charleston, San Francisco State, and Appalachian State, the most admired professors (according to student assessments) reside in the Spanish, music, and psychology departments.
Great teaching alone isn’t enough, though. Fewer students are majoring in the traditional liberal arts disciplines (humanities and social sciences) amid concern such specializations will hurt their prospects after graduation. The liberal arts path doesn’t guarantee a big starting salary, and the tactics that can help you make rapid headway after graduation aren’t as well known as they should be. The horrifying stereotype of liberal arts majors ending up in green smocks pouring coffee at Starbucks has become a trope that won’t go away.
Consider what happened when Steve Pearlstein, a professor of public affairs at George Mason University, invited honors students to read an eight-hundred-page biography of Andrew Carnegie. Everyone liked the book, with its deep insights into human character and economic struggle. Buoyed by this warm response, Pearlstein asked how many of his twenty-four students had chosen to major in a field such as history, English, or philosophy. The answer: only one. The explanation from half a dozen others: “My parents wouldn’t let me.”
The sheer cost of college is causing many families’ time horizons to shrink. After adjusting for scholarships and tuition discounts, the average family needs to muster $27,000 a year for a student to attend a private four-year college; $14,000 annually for the in-state public equivalent. We’ve had hardly any inflation in most other sectors of the U.S. economy since the early 1990s—but colleges never got the memo. Costs keep rising as much as 3 percent more than the overall inflation rate year after year.
If you’re a long-term thinker, the case for college as one of life’s best investments remains strong, no matter what major you choose. Over time, in fact, some liberal arts majors can take you further than even the seemingly hot ticket of a computer science degree. Many parents, however, can’t wait. They have become understandably fixated on starting salaries and the supposedly safe majors that will make college pay off (at least in economic terms) the fastest.
Such shackles exist even at Ivy League schools. Jill Lepore, chair of Harvard’s history and literature program, periodically hosts information sessions at her house so undergraduates can learn about her interdisciplinary initiative. At one session, as Lepore ruefully recounted to the New York Times, an optimistic attendee was bombarded with dire text messages from her parents: Leave right now. Get out of there. That is a house of pain. It’s easy to imagine the alarmist thoughts running through such a parent’s mind: Build your own meth lab, hitchhike across America, just don’t ever set foot inside a historian’s house again.
The warier our society gets, the more we treat learning for its own sake as a fragile form of magic suited only to the confines of high schools, colleges, and universities themselves. Think of Robin Williams’s recklessly enthusiastic English instructor in Dead Poets Society or the mathematician Alan Turing’s struggles in The Imitation Game. These geniuses try so hard, only to discover they can’t fix everything wrong with the world. We view their work with admiration and pity. Even in real life, there’s a tinge of wistfulness on graduation day whenever a professor in a famously impractical field receives an award for distinguished teaching. Thousands of engineering and business graduates pocket their diplomas and race off to become rich, or so it seems, while the admired instructor must keep looping through the same academic routines, endlessly surrendering his or her gifts to an unappreciative world.
Perhaps the academic establishment has built its own cage. In the 1970s and 1980s, as college enrollment surged and newcomers gravitated toward vocational programs, faculty who taught “impractical” subjects took a stubborn pride in learning for its own sake. People who studied civil engineering might be getting trained to build bridges, people who studied nursing might be readied for careers helping patients heal in hospitals—but people who studied the likes of English, philosophy, or sociology were supposed to be operating on a higher plane, learning the purity of independent thought. Jobs would take care of themselves. Besides, for the brightest undergraduates, further education and faculty careers beckoned.
By the late 1990s, though, the old certainties were failing. Too many newly minted PhDs were chasing too few tenure-track openings at universities—creating a fresh crisis of underemployment among the most educated. Meanwhile, undergraduates who didn’t want to become professors weren’t sure where to turn. As liberal arts leaders took stock of society’s not-so-scholarly priorities, they felt betrayed—but didn’t know how to respond. Professors, deans, and provosts wanted all their undergraduates to succeed; these leaders believed what was being taught on campus was intensely valuable. They just didn’t know how to connect campus-honed values to workplace needs. The more vexed these academic leaders became, the more they risked sounding both brittle and smug.
What’s so poignant about this mismatch is that a winning campus-to-career alliance is within reach—if only the combatants could talk about their values, needs, and achievements in a shared language that makes sense to one another. Instead, scholars, students, and employers are at odds because of an agonizing translation problem.
Where’s the common ground? Employers want to hire college graduates who write well, speak clearly, work effectively in teams, and know how to analyze complex problems. All those virtues are central to a good college education, particularly in the liberal arts. All of them are embedded—eight levels down—in the concept of critical thinking, which is a term much loved in academic circles. But if you ask university leaders to explain critical thinking in detail, what ensues is a cacophony of overlapping, conflicting—and self-interested—responses.
It’s painful but true: when academics try hardest to define critical thinking, they inadvertently play into their detractors’ stereotypes. I’ve read university presidents’ testimonials going back to 1935. Academic leaders keep portraying critical thinking as the ability to examine assumptions underlying an argument and the capacity to consider competing perspectives without rushing to judgment. Invoke such abstract, languid phrases in a job interview, however, and you poison your chances. When the academic community talks about what it does best, it spends too much time celebrating the processes by which scholars develop knowledge, too little time championing the real-world payoffs.
To redeem the liberal arts’ good name, we need a fresh way of talking about critical thinking, this time with your postcollege career in mind. We need to showcase, as crisply as possible, the aspects of your liberal arts education that will help you make a significant difference in the world. This means translating the airy descriptors of a commencement speech into another language—the job-market phrases that will help you get hired, gain greater authority, and advance in your career. Critical thinking’s renamed strengths should help you return to campus for your twentieth reunion with the knowledge that you’ve become everything you wanted to be long ago.
I’ve done my best to crack the code. The starting point: Every job ad in the United States that offers a salary of at least a hundred thousand dollars a year while also requiring strong critical-thinking skills. Most of these want ads are well-crafted manifestos of five hundred words or more. They start with detailed job descriptions and crisp lists of formal qualifications yet include some much more human touches toward the end. One of the grim beauties of the American capitalist system is that when businesses are on the brink of spending a lot of money, they tell you, quite candidly, what they want. Before long, a comprehensive picture emerges of what critical thinking really means to a wide cross-section of companies that need graduates like you.
Tapping into the job-ad repositories at Indeed.com in the summer of 2016, I found more than fifty-six hundred listings that offered six-figure pay while calling for critical thinking. The employers ranged from Apple to Allstate; from start-ups and consulting boutiques to the U.S. Department of Labor and Deloitte. It’s a rich medley with something appealing for everyone and a powerful reminder that liberal arts values remain keenly in demand. Each time I opened up a job listing, I made a note of the specific strengths that appeared within ten lines of the key phrase critical thinking. It didn’t take long for clusters of similar attributes to emerge.
When employers ask for critical-thinking skills, the term serves as shorthand for five crucial factors. These start with a confident willingness—perhaps even eagerness—to tackle uncharted areas where nobody knows the rules yet. You bring imagination to your job; you adapt well to new situations. Let’s call this Working on the Frontier.
Next on the list, well-honed analytic methods that make you good at Finding Insights. You thrive on spotting the less obvious answer. As you gain experience and rise in power, you will start synthesizing insights in ways that make you a trusted expert when complex decisions need to be made. Let’s call this higher-level power Choosing the Right Approach.
Finally, you understand group dynamics and other people’s motivations in an unusually deep way. You’re good at Reading the Room, and also at Inspiring Others. Your campus leaders weren’t hopelessly wrong when they tried to describe these capabilities in more academic terms. But you’re now better positioned to make your case in language that aligns harmoniously with what employers want. Master this framework, and you will be surprised how many of your seemingly esoteric liberal arts achievements can be retold in work-friendly contexts. Even something as offbeat as a visit to the ancient Greek battle site of Thermopylae can be relevant. You’ve thought hard about a momentous decision—and all the factors that play into it. If your interviewer has even the haziest familiarity with the movie 300, you’re ready to talk about what it’s like to stand at a narrow pass, imagining that it’s 480 B.C., the enemy is massing—and you’ve got an ax.
Whatever your stage in life, the analysis that follows will show how your liberal arts identity can become a strength, not an embarrassment, as you approach new jobs. You may even develop a smuggler’s pride in the secret, campus-honed skills that serve you well in the outside world. You know how to ace a job interview, how to run a meeting, and how to find a nugget of truth (or a dangerous lie) in a mountain of data.
Let’s take a closer look.
Working on the Frontier
Are you highly self-directed? Can you think outside the box? Can you adapt to a changing environment? Do you thrive on challenges? If you’re nodding your head in response, you’ve got the explorer’s mind-set that enterprises such as Deloitte, Humana, and the Federal Reserve are seeking. These organizations are constantly growing in unexpected directions, making them eager to hire people who embrace the new.
Since the early 1990s, psychologists have been talking up the virtues of boundary-less, “protean” careers, in which individuals write their own job descriptions and chart their own paths. When field researchers ask about actual workplace attitudes, however, it turns out most people aren’t so brave. In one notable survey, the majority of subjects’ self-described profiles fit researchers’ categories of “solid citizens,” “hired guns,” and “trapped/lost.” Less than a third of respondents chose the self-reliant, protean path. We’re still a society that cherishes predictability, as you can see in jobs ranging from making hamburgers at McDonald’s to reading X-rays at the Mayo Clinic. That’s why automation and globalization frighten so many people. Both those forces keep assaulting the world of repetitive work.
Choose the liberal arts path in college, and you’re throwing your lot in with the adventurers. Within the first few terms, you will be building your own interpretations on controversial topics, looking for something new to say, rather than parroting back your professors’ views. You’ll find joy in the times when you make a winning argument. When your first attempts are a bit of a mess, you will learn how to survive and regroup. By senior year, you will take charge of your own learning, picking projects, gathering data, and defining your own reading list. No matter how narrow your immediate topic of interest may be, the deeper you go, the more you acquire the universally useful skill of knowing what to do when you’re on your own.
The most energetic professors will stretch your comfort zones in playful ways that make it easier for you to experiment. Think of them as Pan with a presentation clicker instead of a flute. Dartmouth’s Paul Christesen plays that role at freshman orientation, delivering a rebel’s talk in which he tells students “the best moments in life are when you are just starting something fantastic.” He lets slip that he proposed to his wife, history professor Cecilia Gaposchkin, a week after they met. “Everything has worked out!” he says with a grin. Like many liberal arts colleges, Dartmouth doesn’t offer preprofessional degrees in fields such as accounting and physical therapy—and he makes no apologies for this omission.
If anything, the digital revolution makes humanistic learning more valuable, Christesen asserts. “The rise of the Internet and smartphones means that if you need extra facts, you can find them quickly,” he points out. “That reduces the value of fact-packed heads that can’t analyze well.” He prefers to prepare people for an unpredictable future by developing universally useful ways of analyzing situations and by instilling an open-minded confidence about exploring the new. Get that right, he contends, and you’ve gained expertise that will pay off no matter how many times you change careers.
When Ally Begly arrived at Dartmouth in 2007, she thought she would focus on premed classes and become a doctor. In her first few months on campus, she was unsettled by how many premeds treated learning as an unpleasant chore. Her peers fixated on finding shortcuts to earning the As medical schools demanded. Begly wanted something different out of college. Having enjoyed Latin in high school, she decided the classics department might provide a better academic home for her. “It was really hard to do well in classics,” she recalled. “You couldn’t open a research book, learn the content, and pass it off as your knowledge. You couldn’t regurgitate.”
This new tempo, Begly decided, was her path to a better future. Her first major term paper in the field was a twenty-page examination of a small subset of Greek funeral urns; it explored the question of whether ancient amphorae were customized for each person’s remains or were largely standardized. No textbook offered her the answer. She spent long evenings in the Dartmouth library, analyzing details and building a theory. “It was my introduction to the misery and the magic of trying to do something original,” she recalled. “When I got an A, it felt really great. I was in a field where it was safe to be enthusiastic.”
Since college, Begly has transformed this enthusiasm into a successful, and meaningful, career as a teacher. She is becoming an expert on the ways fourth- and fifth-grade girls learn science—and why they often experience a sudden loss of confidence academically as they approach the middle-school years. She thinks a lot about the impostor syndrome. An anxious question from one of her students stays on her mind too: Why hasn’t any woman walked on the moon? “There’s room for change,” Begly said, “and I’d like to be part of the process.”
A few years ago, Christesen asked his undergraduates to ponder why Athenian art never paid homage to naval victories in the fifth century B.C. The academic community hadn’t solved that one, and Christesen wanted to see if fresh, inexperienced minds could make any headway. “Most scholars aren’t any smarter than students,” he later explained to me. “We simply know more, which can be a handicap if we’ve grown used to certain ways of thinking about things.”
Undergraduate Sarah Murray seized the opportunity, developing such arresting answers that she was invited to present her findings at a major conference of classics scholars. Momentarily flustered just before going onstage, she looked to Christesen for reassurance. “I told her she would be in a room with the world’s leading expert,” Christesen recalled. “She looked even more aghast. And then I explained: ‘It’s you. You know more than anyone else.’”
A dozen years later, Murray is an academic in her own right with faculty experience at Notre Dame and the University of Nebraska. She continues to work on the frontier, pushing ahead the new discipline of digital humanities. By introducing modern-day data analytics to antiquity’s murkiest problems, she’s once again finding insights no one else anticipated.
Finding Insights
Are you naturally curious? Are you good at connecting the dots? Can you filter and distill information? Are you calm and productive in the face of ambiguity? Those questions come from employers as diverse as the movie creators at Sony, the digital-storage enthusiasts at Dropbox, and the thermostat makers at Johnson Controls. Practically every organization is wrestling with the information age’s awkward disparity: too much data, not enough clarity.
It takes training to feel at home with mountains of incomplete, haphazardly organized information, to become confident you can distill everything into a few powerful insights. When Hui Min Chang arrived at the University of Chicago as a freshman in 2009, she knew she could gain some of this mind-set by studying economics. To her surprise, though, further breakthroughs came in an entirely different field: nineteenth-century French art.
“I did a paper for my senior seminar on Édouard Manet’s Olympia,” Chang told me. It’s a provocative painting that has scandalized generations of viewers, partly because the central figure is a naked French woman with no trace of shame on her face, but also because the secondary figure is a black servant in a jarringly deferential pose. The painting, the historical context, public reactions—Chang reveled in each aspect. “I ended up explaining the context of that nude vis-à-vis French attitudes toward salons, liberty, prostitution, and more,” Chang recalled. While she didn’t discuss Olympia specifically in her interviews for finance-industry jobs, she frequently talked up her art-history interests as a sign of an inquiring mind.
Employers bought her argument. Today Chang is an associate investment analyst at Morningstar, a Chicago financial-research firm. She specializes in writing about quant investments, approaches that use intricate computer models to predict trends across capital markets. The job, as she explains it, challenges her to sort through many complex factors at once, just as she did in her undergraduate days. “In the markets, it’s not obvious what the driver is for the next six months,” she told me. “It’s similar to art history. You can’t cover everything. You have to pick and choose.”
A liberal arts education is hardly the only way to master such challenges. Keep the number of unknowns under control, and a specialist’s background in business or engineering may prove better. Graduates from either of those programs are well-trained problem solvers too. The foundations of critical thinking aren’t monastic secrets unknown outside the humanities and social sciences. Yet in the most turbulent fields, everything is in flux and nobody’s model works perfectly. When the extent of what’s unknown hasn’t been established, the fluidity and highly developed lateral thinking of liberal arts training can carry the day. A background in the humanities and social sciences helps you get comfortable working with scanty data when nothing better is available. You become good at building provisional inferences when others are stuck. Often your early guesses prove right, making you unusually good at spotting emerging patterns before others do.
Consider how much can be extracted from a few snippets of military history in any culture. The texts don’t just recount a battle; they share clues about what people ate, what they wore, and how each side’s social hierarchies worked. What’s omitted can be revelatory too. (Where are the women?) You could spend hours picking at one short passage before you are sure you’ve extracted as much as possible. Step into a business setting a few years later, and you will discover the same game is alive again. Everything from negotiators’ terse e-mails to a competitor’s ad copy can tell you a lot more than the surface reveals if you just pay close enough attention.
Evan Golden has settled into Los Angeles as an independent screenwriter. His scripts focus on modern-day dramas involving everything from women’s professional wrestling to failed marriages. He studied classics in college a decade ago and says it helps him in his current work. “When you’re trying to establish a character’s motivation, it’s surprisingly similar to inferring why people moved an ancient city from low ground to high ground,” Golden told me. “I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing famous films, but it isn’t the same. All the decisions have been made. All you see is the finished product. You can’t really reconstruct all the choices the screenwriter or director had, and why he or she went down a particular path.” Confronting open-ended uncertainty—and then deciding what to do about it—is “a rare gift that classics provides to everyone.”
Arthur Motch started college as an economics major, thinking it would prepare him for a career as a professional investor. To his chagrin, he didn’t like econ’s large lecture classes or its rigid curriculum. He went hunting for a different field that invited students to develop fresh ideas in small seminars. Classics fit the bill. He could sharpen his mind by doing fine-grained text analysis for hours and then match wits with a handful of classmates in provocative class discussions. “I liked the sense of figuring it out, reaching the point where I realized something no one else knew,” Motch recalled.
These days, Motch runs Sustainable Income Capital Management, a twenty-million-dollar hedge fund in New York, specializing in unusual types of debt instruments other investors ignore. (Think municipal-lighting-system bonds.) He’s famous for finding tidbits in the back pages of financial statements that help him spot unusual value or avoid pitfalls. “I’m one of the very few people who reads all the footnotes,” Motch quipped. “That’s how you can spot the classics majors on Wall Street.”
Choosing the Right Approach
Are you a problem solver? Can you act on opportunities? Can you find creative solutions? Can we trust you to make the go/no-go decisions? Organizations such as FedEx, McKinsey, and PayPal ask questions like these when their attention turns to critical thinking. The reason: Business is complicated. The higher you move in management, the more you deal with tough situations where the best solution isn’t always obvious. Such circumstances require discernment, decisiveness, and the magic blend that goes by the name of good judgment.
One school of thought argues that good judgment can’t be rushed. All we can do is stumble through life for a while, gradually learning from our mistakes. Yet a well-structured college education can provide a spectacular blend of case studies, teaching precepts, and iterative revisions of major assignments. Taken together, these experiences can accelerate the journey toward better judgment. Liberal arts classes, in particular, train students to keep taking the wide view, allowing them to pick up important factors on the periphery that they might otherwise overlook. That’s how people read novels; it’s how they build sociological models; it’s the essence of careful history or political science. I can’t find my college diploma anymore; it got lost somewhere in the course of ten postgraduation moves. But if I close my eyes, I can still hear a chorus of long-ago history and literature professors asking our classes: “What else? What else?”
Less than two years after graduating from the University of Michigan (BA, psychology, 2015), Isabelle Abrams found her judgment being tested in a big way. She had settled into a consulting job that involved face-to-face dealings with big consumer-products companies. One client wanted to understand why pet owners split their shopping across different stores. Everything sounded simple at first. Then the project got complicated. Was this mostly about dog and cat food or did food for other pets matter too? What about people who bought fish food from friendly experts in specialty stores but hunted for rock-bottom prices on dog food in grocery stores? Each client meeting revealed new subtleties that hadn’t been on the table before. It took considerable diplomacy to keep redesigning the survey without leaving everyone feeling frustrated.
“We probably needed twenty hours of meetings to figure everything out—but we did it,” Abrams told me. “I realized it was essential to ask Why? questions. We had to resist the temptation to race ahead to a quick answer. Everything was usually a bigger issue than what surfaced at first.”
Michigan had prepared her well. As a college junior, Abrams had helped marketing researchers analyze people’s perceptions of healthy and unhealthy foods with an eye to eaters’ subsequent eagerness (or lack thereof) to work off the calories they had just ingested. That study required her and her research colleagues to think deeply about why study subjects held the food attitudes that they did, even if those views seemed illogical. Other psychology projects introduced her to the abrupt judgments that people make when deciding whether to be generous or stingy. She came out of college knowing a lot about the obvious and hidden factors that influence decisions; she was unusually well prepared for a high-stakes consulting job.
Such aspects of critical thinking become increasingly important as your career plays out. Entry-level jobs typically adhere to well-established rules. Someone older and more experienced will tell you what to do and how to do it. This quasi-parental oversight soon fades, especially if you are ambitious. Before long, it’s time to make decisions on your own, even if the facts are hazy and the rules unknown. Your nominal bosses won’t know any more than you do. It will be up to you whether to build a product or scrap it; whether to approve an edgy ad campaign or start over. Equivocating won’t be an option. You get paid for your acumen; success will require you to be perceptive in a wide range of ways.
How can you train yourself for such challenges? Amy Pressman studied history—and a lot more—at Harvard in the 1980s, without any expectation of going on to a career in business. Today, she is president of Medallia, a Silicon Valley software company that partners with everyone from Google to Gallup. When I asked her how she developed the mind-set that makes her effective today, she started describing a chaotic term in college when she was taking classes in art, sociology, psychology, and physics. “All of them were stressing the concept of space from four completely different perspectives,” she recalled. “It made me realize that no idea exists in isolation. I got in the habit of looking for connective tissue, even when it wasn’t obvious.”
Reading the Room
Can you build a team? Can you balance different perspectives and agendas? Can you understand the big picture? Can you manage through influence? Employers have been looking for these sorts of socially minded strengths since at least the 1930s. At first, this was an unambitious search, focused mostly on finding sales clerks with pleasant personalities. Not anymore. Financial giants such as BlackRock routinely cite team-building as a priority when hiring people for jobs paying a hundred thousand dollars a year or more. Leading Internet retailers such as eBay want candidates who know how to satisfy multiple agendas and still keep everything moving forward.
These are teachable strengths—and college is a great place to learn them. People are starting to jettison the well-traveled but condescending label soft skills in public discussion of these traits. I’m encountering a flurry of interest in power skills, which sounds far more apt. In the same spirit, emotional intelligence is a much-talked-about screening criterion in hunts for chief executives. All of these variants, of course, are very much in step with the liberal arts’ emphasis on understanding different people’s perspectives.
At Southwestern University, just north of Austin, Texas, English professor Helene Meyers asked some of her undergraduates in the autumn of 2015 to list the academic skills they had mastered. As she later recounted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the students’ lists began with writing and research but went on to include listening, speaking, managing a project, and “the ability to connect the small with the big picture.” When Meyers asked what surprised students the most, “one of them excitedly blurted out, ‘These are all marketable skills.’”
Indeed. Analyze literature, and you’re digging deep into the main characters’ competing motivations. During a course entitled Novel English Majors, Meyers introduced her students to a wide variety of careers in which well-read students of the human condition could thrive. Examples ranged from grant writing to managing restaurants and running nonprofits. Even the tech sector was in reach. As Meyers wrote: “If students have learned to connect diverse texts and traditions, they very likely have developed the skills needed to be liaisons between software creators and end users.”
Study sociology, history, or political science, and the same dynamic is in play. You explore the tension between labor and management, immigrants and nativists, or any of the countless groups in opposition. You develop a keen sense of how coalitions form and conflicts get resolved. In any of these disciplines, you balance competing ideas in your own mind; you create carefully calibrated models that take the whole picture into account.
Know what makes other people tick, and you can steer through complex situations skillfully. “Most liberal arts majors have a conscience—or at least they have been taught the basis for forming one,” a Chicago hiring manager told me in the midst of a long conversation about his firm’s recruiting practices. He wasn’t trying to malign people with preprofessional degrees. But he was trying to help me gain a deeper understanding of the reasons why an aptitude for reading the room makes business sense. Find people whose college educations emphasized taking a panoramic view of everyone else’s concerns, and those fairness-first attitudes can prevent big trouble down the road.
Sometimes, humility is the hidden virtue employers want. During college, Joe Indvik struggled to pin down the accuracy or follies of Herodotus’s ancient histories. Indvik came up with some intriguing ideas but also conceded that in certain areas, “We just don’t know.” Now he works in Washington, DC, as an environmental consultant, advising the Department of Energy and an assortment of start-ups. Many engagements involve bridging different viewpoints on the same problem, in the same way that a historian unravels conflicting narratives. “Sometimes, the right answer is the midpoint of all the viewpoints. Sometimes, a viewpoint is just plain wrong. I find that the best leaders are humble enough to understand when their behavior is part of the very problem they are trying to solve.”
Immerse yourself deeply in another culture, and a more compassionate self emerges. Kari Dallas visited Greece as a liberal arts undergraduate more than a decade ago, but she still remembers a shocking incident that occurred in a Greek town while she was walking through the city streets beside a classmate with intensely blue eyes. “A young girl stared in horror at those blue eyes and crossed herself,” Dallas recalled. “It was as if she had seen a devil.” It’s about digging into the way things are in a place, not just the way they seem.
Serving more recently as a lawyer in eastern Oregon, Dallas has dealt mostly with trusts and business transactions. “I work with clients who have limited English or who bring their children or friends along as interpreters,” she told me. “My time in Greece has certainly influenced those dealings. It helped me understand what it’s like to be the stranger… to be out of place.”
Inspiring Others
Can you inspire confidence? Can you energize others to embrace change? Are you concise and organized? Can you convey information effectively? There’s a new urgency in employers’ wish lists when it comes to hiring the type of person who can connect with other people. Morale is more fragile, cynicism runs deeper, and hard-nosed assertions of authority end up being the opposite of leadership. Businesses don’t run well when customers are confused, when employees become lethargic, or when everyone is dispirited. Strong leadership can’t exist in a vacuum; it needs to take root in face-to-face, heart-to-heart communications, every day.
If your critical-thinking skills include the ability to speak or write persuasively, employers such as American Express, Cox Communications, and Genentech want you, now. One huge zone of opportunity involves traditional clusters in advertising, marketing, speechwriting, and public relations. There’s equally strong demand in core business areas where leadership and communication have become so intertwined that it’s impossible to separate those two traits. If you’re interested in sales, strategic planning, recruiting, consulting, project management, or a host of other job categories, take note. Your ability to tell a story—or win an argument—will win employers’ admiration.
As an English major at Mississippi College, Susan Farris focused on the emotional struggles we choose to hide. She won a campus writing prize for a short story about the bedside evasions associated with a dying woman’s final days. When she graduated in 2013, she wasn’t sure where to turn. Friends steered her toward EdgeTheory, a Mississippi social-media company scrambling to find high-empathy writers and editors.
In May 2016, I spent a morning watching Farris construct messages of hope and hardship on behalf of a nurse-training program trying to reach new candidates via Twitter. “This is a long game,” Farris explained to me. Getting the mood right was everything. With Farris at the keyboard, everything being transmitted spoke about saving lives… overcoming panic… fighting cancer… or staying alert on the night shift. The hard sell for the $425 training classes could wait. For now, the short-story writer was stirring people’s feelings, and getting paid properly for it.
A few months later, I chatted with a cluster of recent liberal arts graduates creating digital-marketing material in Provo, Utah. They reinforced Farris’s message of pride and relief; they weren’t just comma-moving technicians trying to make corporate prose sound better—they were enjoying the freedom and authority to define a big organization’s story. Power had shifted. In the noisy, jaded society of today, the ability to inspire other people is becoming more valuable than ever.
“I humanize things,” explained Bryce Nobles, a 2015 graduate of Brigham Young University. To him, there was a natural path between his BYU days as an American studies major, reading Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson, and his current job. He created the charts, e-books, and reports that Qualtrics, a market-research company, used in connecting with its customers. “What’s the customer experience?” he asked me. “What’s the American dream? They aren’t so far apart.”
Traditionally, the peak moments of a liberal arts education are defined by writing. College is where you struggle to master the demands of a twenty-page term paper or perhaps a much longer senior thesis. Within the world of the university, writing is still regarded as the highest form of communication. Away from academia, however, priorities are different. We’ve become a nation of talkers. The past twenty years have seen the rise of podcasts, webinars, talk radio, TED Talks, conference calls, Skype, and YouTube videos. Traditional barriers of distance and cost have vanished. New technology (especially dirt-cheap Internet bandwidth) has realigned the way we communicate. Speech is in the ascendant, while formal writing is struggling to hold its stature.
This transition shouldn’t distress you. Even if your professors’ grading metrics haven’t caught up, the everyday nature of studying the humanities and social sciences will serve you well. Those freewheeling gab sessions late at night in the dorm weren’t a waste of time after all. When the Association of American Colleges and Universities asked employers recently to list the most important skills college graduates should possess, strong speaking skills showed up at the very top. Strong writing skills was second.
I see the payoff in the workplace constantly. On the speaking circuit, at industry conferences, and in small meetings, certain presenters stand out. Their advantage transcends nice clothes, winning smiles, or well-modulated voices. They are “comfortable and charismatic,” to borrow a phrase from a BlackBerry job ad. These speakers move smoothly back and forth between key points and supportive detail. They know how to make numbers and narrative work in harmony. They use wit quite skillfully. Analogies too. As for their majors—you know the answer.
Visit TED.com, and you will encounter hundreds of exciting onstage presentations by scientists, politicians, social activists, and other people of note. Several hundred talks at TED conferences have earned at least one million page views since being released online. As of early 2017, only three have crossed the thirty-million-view threshold—a level that makes them arguably more popular than any music single released in the past twenty years. Atop this list is a talk on creativity by English and drama major Ken Robinson, followed by a presentation on body language by social psychologist Amy Cuddy, and then a talk on the ways great leaders inspire action by anthropology major Simon Sinek.
Rhetoric, as it happens, was one of antiquity’s original seven liberal arts. Mindful of that heritage, Dartmouth’s Paul Christesen asks undergraduates in the Greece study-abroad program to deliver a half-hour talk at some point summing up their backgrounds, interests, achievements, anxieties, and ambitions. There are no other rules. Preparing for these talks becomes a soul-searching exercise that students vividly remember a decade later. Some admit to imagining themselves being back in Greece again and again, revising their youthful remarks each year as they redefine who they’ve become and who they want to be.
At another juncture, Christesen’s students visit the ruined sanctuary of Delphi; each student has been assigned an altar or a statue to research ahead of time. On the afternoon of the visit, students walk the grounds together and take turns sharing their knowledge with as much zest as they can muster. The hallmark of a winning presentation: attracting a following of casual tourists who think official docents are providing a guided tour.
In 2009, Alexandra Maceda was a Dartmouth sophomore standing in front of the three surviving columns of what was once a twenty-column temple. “This is the Tholos,” she began. In her black shorts and long-sleeved fleece jersey, she looked like just another college student. But as she gestured toward the temple’s walls and benches, a crowd began to form. She knew so much! She was so confident! Australian backpackers wiggled forward so they could hear better.
Two years later, Maceda won a well-paying consulting job at Bain and Company right after graduation. With a bachelor’s degree in classics, she didn’t know as much about financial modeling as some of the business majors Bain had hired from other schools. She had a lot of catching up to do, but she was comfortable working on the edge. She could build bridges between different kinds of information. What’s more, whenever she got up to speak, she radiated her own version of comfortable charisma. She was exactly what Bain needed.