Liberal arts degrees should be valued the same as pre-professional ones
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Liberal arts students have stopped trusting their education, and it’s not their fault.
Syracuse University is a school that prides itself on its unique blend of liberal arts and pre-professional schools. In some classes, finance majors from the Whitman School of Management can sit next to history majors from the College of Arts and Sciences.
This diversity is just one of the many things that make SU special, but it also highlights a growing divide between students pursuing the liberal arts and those in more employment-oriented degrees.
In April, SU sunsetted nine undergraduate majors in the College of Arts and Sciences. It’s easy to see why, with declining enrollment and shrinking budgets — an institution has to do what’s necessary to stay solvent. But when a university decides which majors are worth keeping and which ones aren’t, it shows its priorities.
Liberal arts majors aren’t meant to lead you directly into a career. They’re meant to teach you how to think for yourself based on curiosity and passion, not how to achieve a certain job title.
But at SU, that idea feels like it’s quietly losing ground. Talk to enough finance or pre-med majors, and you might notice a pattern: The major isn’t chosen out of curiosity, but because of how it’ll read on a resume. The club that you join sometimes isn’t because you care about its mission or philanthropy, but because of the name attached.
Majors themselves are being treated less like an intellectual commitment and more like a strategic asset — something to be optimized, not explored.
This isn’t happening because students have lost interest in the liberal arts. It’s happening because they’ve lost confidence that the job market will reward them.
This isn’t happening because students have lost interest in the liberal arts. It’s happening because they have lost confidence that the job market will reward them.Peyton Tapp, Columnist
In an economy where most entry-level jobs require extensive experience and are consistently expecting more out of recent graduates, curiosity begins to feel like a luxury that few can afford. So, students respond with what they think will reward them in four years. They pick the class, the club, the internship that reads well on a piece of paper, even if it means treating their own education as a means to an end rather than an end in itself.
The instinct to play it safe inevitably comes with a cost. A liberal arts education is made to build comfort with not knowing — sitting with a difficult text, following a question without a clear answer, being willing and able to be wrong. These aren’t side effects of the degree; they’re exactly what it’s meant to teach.
The pressures felt by students in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and Arts and Sciences are the result of a much larger issue concerning what a college degree is supposed to guarantee.
SU isn’t alone. Enrollment in humanities and liberal arts majors has been declining for over a decade. According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, students enrolled in liberal arts majors dropped about 26% from fall 2015 to fall 2023. Students and families are more likely to lean toward a pre-professional major at any school because those degrees are seen as safer bets.
Students aren’t wrong for picking a major with their futures in mind, but there needs to be a difference between preparing for a career and treating your entire education as a means to one.
The liberal arts were never meant to be efficient; they were meant to be formative. They’re made to leave you changed, not with a certain set of credentials. If the state of our entry-level job market continues leading students to treat their degrees this way, we might begin to lose the liberal arts completely.
Peyton Tapp is a junior majoring in philosophy and political science. She can be reached at petapp@syr.edu.
