I went to an expensive liberal arts college on the East Coast, the kind you often hear derided in articles questioning the value of expensive higher education that reaps limited professional rewards. To many, choosing an emphasis on the humanities in higher education seems foolhardy, but my experience has convinced me otherwise. I’ll be paying for this education for many years to come and do wish I’d better understood the full implications of my loans and their interest a little earlier in the process, but even if I had, I’d have gone to the same school and sought out the same classes and experiences.  I’ll never regret the education I got, although I may bemoan those loan payments every month.

So, what makes it so valuable?  How can I justify my four years studying literature, philosophy, film history and foreign languages rather than a specific trade that may have more directly led to job security (and likely much less debt)? For me, that question’s complicated, but easy to answer: I feel like it made me a better person and a better thinker.

On the professional end, it made me better at writing, communicating my thoughts well and analyzing problems.  It  gave me a much greater confidence in my sense of self and ability to take on life.  Every job I’ve had since college I’ve been able to: pick up a great variety of tasks; balance many responsibilities at once; handle my time well; think creatively about the best way to address the issues placed in front of me; and, perhaps most importantly, get along with and work well with other people. While the professional value of a degree in the humanities isn’t immediately clear, it brings with it a variety of skills that can pay dividends in many possible fields and positions.

I remember once being asked by a colleague who preferred reading non-fiction what I felt the value was in works of fiction. To me it seems so obvious: fiction teaches you empathy.  We live in a society where it’s so easy to fall into the common trap of us vs them. We all encounter instances where people are viewed in terms of their political identity rather than as individuals, or largely dismissed altogether in the general consciousness (when was the last time you thought much about what a prison inmate’s life is like, for example?).  This is much harder to do if you spend a considerable amount of time letting your mind be taken over by characters in different contexts than your own.  It teaches you to make more of an effort to understand the world as it looks and is for others and compels you to care more about the experiences of people you have no direct relationship to.

I think that really speaks to part of what makes the humanities so important.  It teaches people to see the world through a larger lens and consider how our actions and decisions influence people beyond us. I wish more of our society saw fit to value this as much as I do.

This post was largely inspired by a couple of articles that I’ve come across in the last week or so.  This article in the New Yorker talks at length about how an education in the humanities compares to other focuses in higher education.  This piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education gives current students a chance to explain why they embraced the decision to study liberal arts rather than something more “practical.” They all speak poignantly on the subject and, hopefully, prove some of what they’re saying to any possible skeptics in the process.