According to Scott Gerber, no and he sure is good at backing that claim up. From statistics to logos to just plain anger, Mr. Gerber does a very good job of demonstrating how LIberal Arts programs are failing their students.
His opening line, "When are Americans going to
wake up and realize that the 60s and 70s-era nostalgia for the
"value" of a college degree is just that -- nostalgia?" He follows the statistics with an anecdote. He was at a conference in California at the Lyles Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He praises some of the colleges here for adapting to the times and recognizing that entrepreneurship is a necessary skill in today's world. However, he bashes one specific college president who cut an entrepreneurship program because he "didn't understand the tangible value of such a program." And this is where the pathos begins. For the next paragraph and a half, he doesn't really offer any proof or even logic, he simply makes emotional claims such as "we are failing not only our kids with the current state of liberal arts degrees, we are failing the economy". These claims work though, because he has already demonstrated with numbers that he's right in the preceding paragraphs.
He then jumps back into numbers, giving poll results on students and finding that of the 44 percent of the population that had access to entrepreneur classes, only 38 percent found those classes helpful. Again, before going too deep into pathos he falls back to statistics, which help his ethos because it veers away from bias and toward fact.
Then he starts another anecdote about Babson, this time relying on logos for persuasion. Babson students spend less time in the classroom, and more time being an entrepreneur in a controlled environment. Learn by doing, makes sense right? It does makes sense, and Mr. Gerber is depending on that.
He ends with a pretty personal stab at college presidents by comparing them to CEOs. If a CEO turned out a product that was unusable (unusable being an analogy for unemployed), that CEO would get fired. And so too should college presidents, Gerber says.
Through his varied use of different types of appeals and clever placement of facts, Scott Gerber creates a very persuasive point that sounds passionate without sounding biased.
For some reason his response isn't very visible on my server. There is a large white blotch in he middle.
ReplyDeleteThere we go.
DeleteFixed it.
I don't know why it's doing that.
ReplyDeleteIt's rather annoying...
...almost as annoying as seeing all of my typos due to fat-finger iPad typing syndrome.
ReplyDeleteGerber's arguments sound compelling based on your post (haven't read article, yet). But, I'm not convinced that a Liberal Arts degree is useless. First, success and failure must be defined: Is monetary gain the measuring stick? If so, he may be on to something, but he'd still be wrong if he doesn't acknowledge that the most popular and sought after Liberal Arts schools (small, expensive, located in the Northeast) churn out more 'successes' than any trade school or entrepreneur school that he could ever cite. When it comes to Ivy, Patriot League, and NESCAC schools, you genuinely get what you pay for. The network at these schools is vast and rooted in a history of elitism and power -- so at least for the rime being, a Sociology degree from _____________(insert small, NE, LA school) exceeds the weight of an internship program at Nova Southeastern University of Ft. lauderdale, FL if both students are, say, applying to graduate school, interviewing for a job at BCHigh, interviewing on Wall Street,, etc. I appreciate Gerber's attempt to be a renegade and 'stick it to the man' but power is the only thing more influential than money in this country, and small Liberal Arts schools have a lot of both.
ReplyDeleteWhat his thesis should be is that undergraduate degrees from non small Liberal Arts schools in New England are worthless. Which means, if I'm a parent sending my child to an affordable school outside of New England such as the aforementioned NSEU of Ft. lauderdale, I'd prefer, if I'm interested in my child making money (not necessarily the values shared by all people), for them to do an entrepreneurship in the business school or a professional degree such as Nursing over a Liberal Arts major such as Anthropology.