Why I Chose To Study Liberal Arts In The US

This article was written for such a long time ago, but I believed it is still helpful for those who have an ambiguous notion of what Liberal Arts Colleges really are and some of their big advantages/disadvantages, as well as for who considering what college/university to choose for your future higher education.

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Why I Chose To Study Liberal Arts In The US

by RONALD LIM CHYI TUNG

Editor’s Note: Ronald Lim Chyi Tung is a student at Wesleyan University. The following article was written in response to the debate over education reforms in the writer’s home country of Singapore.
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The debate on educational reforms struck a chord with me in view of my personal educational experience.

I am currently pursuing my undergraduate education at a liberal-arts college in the United States. While universities are institutions with large departments, a large student body and a greater focus on postgraduate-level study, liberal-arts colleges are much smaller institutions with smaller student bodies specialising in undergraduate education.

Liberal-arts colleges are known for their small class sizes and intimate learning environment characterised by close interaction between students and faculty members.

By the time a student graduates, he is expected to have taken courses in nine subject areas from each of three categories: the Natural Sciences and Mathematics, the Arts and Humanities, and the Social and Behavioural Sciences. There is also a great emphasis on the interpretation of non-verbal texts (that is, music, art, and dance).

Because liberal-arts colleges are much smaller, they tend to be less well-known, compared to the Ivy League. You might, or might not, have heard of liberal-arts colleges like Wesleyan, Amherst, Swarthmore, Wellesley, and Williams.

I came here to give myself more time to explore, and then to decide what I really want to specialise in. I came here also to get away from the stigma which many Singaporean employers attach to a degree in the Arts and Social Sciences, which is perceived to be ‘useless’. I remember trying to explain to people why I chose to go to an unheard-of-in-Singapore college (Wesleyan University), rather than the prestigious London School of Economics to do a fixed course in the area of Government and Economics, which I wasn’t sure was my cup of tea.

People told me: ‘What’s the use of going to this liberal-arts school? How are you going to get a job with a degree from this place which is not part of the Ivy League?’

I don’t know the answer to that question, the thought of which makes me cringe. It reminded me of the time at the end of secondary school when I decided to go to the arts stream in junior college (JC), as opposed to the science stream, because I knew that Physics and Chemistry were not my cup of tea.

People around me were genuinely concerned that I would deprive myself of the chance of getting a ‘useful’ engineering or medical degree.

Up till the end of JC, has the purpose of my education been to get into university so that I could get a good job?

Was I just a human resource who could be moulded into ‘the creative workforce of the 21st century’, or was I supposed to be that individual who was nurtured to articulate his thoughts and question the world?

I came here to find myself constantly engaged in the spirit of exploration, whether or not I was in the classroom. Students who came through the portals of a liberal-arts college were not regarded as a human resource which was to be trained for the workforce.

They were regarded as individuals, each with their own opinions, who came together for the sole purpose of learning and having an education that could be considered as ‘liberating’.

I found that one main difference between the system that Singapore tried to adopt from America and the American system itself was that, in Singapore, the end towards which policy-makers tried to work was to produce an individual equipped with thinking skills so that they could have a ‘creative workforce’ for the new economy.

In America, however, education and the spirit of exploration were the end in themselves. An educated individual who questions the world he lives in is the desired outcome, and it is in this spirit of exploration and learning that one learns to think and view everything from different perspectives.

It is only when one is true to the spirit of learning for learning’s sake that the desired result of a ‘thinking’ individual is reaped.

One more thing I learnt is that creativity and individualism are intertwined and that you can’t have one without the other.

This led me to ponder whether one can engineer a ‘creative workforce’, which is an oxymoron because ‘creative’ denotes individualism and ‘workforce’ denotes assimilation.

As I got to know the Americans, I found that they came here with a different mindset. Not everyone intended to graduate and lead a high-flying Wall Street career.

A close friend of mine is majoring in Art History and intends to go into museum work. Another person I know spent a semester in Tibet and intends to specialise in Tibetan Buddhism at the postgraduate level. Someone else I know is an East Asian Studies major and intends to teach English in Japan before specialising in Japanese Studies in graduate school. Others spend a great time engaging in political and social activism.

I realised that society does not penalise each of them for the decision they make, unlike in Singapore where the oppor-tunity costs of doing so at the expense of job security are too high.

Coincidentally, I realised that many employers here, like in Singapore, are still biased towards people who graduate with degrees in Economics than in other subject areas.

While the American job market is not as accommodating of people who choose to major in ‘impractical’ areas of study, there is a place in American society for each and every one of these persons who choose to study what they like.

Price of College Too Steep

In a couple of weeks, thousands of local students will graduate from high school.

A couple of months after that, many of them will be starting college.

And four years after that, most of them will find themselves tens of thousand of dollars in debt.

Such is the ritual that’s becoming ever more problematic for our nation’s young people and their parents.
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College tuition is rising beyond most people’s ability to afford it. At the same time, college has become a prerequisite for most careers, meaning more high school students are being steered toward college as a way to get decent jobs. Because of the high demand for their services, colleges can charge whatever they want. They can also be more selective in who they accept and be more discriminatory about what kind of financial aid they hand out, and to whom.

High school guidance counselors say kids are not only having more difficulty getting into college because of the glut of students, but they’re also having to select colleges based not only on the quality of the education, but on what they can afford.

Many families cannot afford the $30,000 or $40,000 a year that it costs to send one child to college, let alone two or three. Then once they graduate, these students who are trying to establish careers and families — a time when they are struggling the hardest — find themselves crushed by their college debt.

According to the U.S. secretary of education, students are graduating with nearly twice as much education-related debt as they did a decade ago. In New York — where annual private college tuition averages $30,367 and public school tuition is about $13,000 — nearly three out of five undergraduates take out loans. The Public Interest Research Group found that nearly 40 percent of college students nationwide leave college with “unmanageable” debt levels.

What we have here is a crisis. And the solutions, while there are many being examined, aren’t coming fast enough.

Last month, Gov. Eliot Spitzer appointed a Commission on Higher Education to look at ways to improve higher education in the state.

Perspective students and their parents attend a Skidmore College open house in 2001. With the rising cost of college tuition, students and their parents must consider more and more what colleges the student can afford.

To order copies of staff-produced photos from The Post-Star, please visit http://reprints.poststar.com/.

In addition to boosting the quality and image of the state university system, the commission’s tasks include analyzing the financing of public universities, evaluating the role of community colleges, determining a reasonable cost of education, and evaluating the types and amounts of financial aid from provided by the state and federal governments, private sources, alumni and tuition.

In Congress, the Senate Finance Committee is working on ways to expand federal income-tax credits for higher education, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. To pay for the credits, the committee is considering limiting tax-free tuition benefits that colleges offer employees, taxing endowments, and perhaps initiating tuition price controls.

Last fall, the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education recommended a series of reforms that included boosting financial aid, restructuring the entire financial aid system to make it simpler, and boosting incentives for colleges to better manage costs.

Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand, for her part, has offered an amendment that would help financially strapped undergraduate students by offering scholarships if they enroll in science, technology, engineering and math programs. The amendment is still pending. And during her successful election campaign last year, Gillibrand advocated an income tax deduction of up to $10,000 a year for college tuition expenses.

State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has rooted out illegal relationships between colleges and loan companies that result in higher interest payments for students.

And locally, Adirondack Community College is working to make a bachelor’s education more affordable by expanding its relationship with four-year-colleges such as the College of St. Rose and Plattsburgh State. This summer, construction is expected to begin on a $7 million Regional Higher Education Center that will allow that relationship to expand.

But change is not happening fast enough to help the millions of students across the nation who will find themselves in this nearly overwhelming predicament in the coming years.

The state and federal government need to do more to reduce the onerous burden of tuition costs and student loans by reforming education assistance and re-evaluating the cost and operation of student loan programs.

And they need to examine the root causes of tuition hikes and seek ways to rein them in. In New York, that means encouraging state-operated colleges to operate more efficiently (cheaper) and ensuring that educational programs are worthwhile and relevant to the changing marketplace.

A bachelor’s degree is the high school degree of the 21st century. If students can’t afford that degree, then their futures are in jeopardy.

A lot is already being done. But there’s still a long way to go.

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Our view: Government needs to do more to rein in burden of higher education on families.

Source: PostStar.com