Courtesy of Dr. Jacob L. Stump
Shepherd University is a public liberal arts university, but the liberal arts are enduring some hard times right now. The ascendency of a market-driven political economy and popular corporate culture has increasingly made life difficult for public liberal arts colleges and universities in the U.S.
Public universities are dependent on government funding. Funding for higher education has precipitously declined over the past 20 years and in turn tuition has precipitously risen—almost doubled, in fact, as The Atlantic reported. Between 2008 and 2014, as a May report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed, West Virginia cut funding for higher education by 21.6% and is one of eight states continuing to cut public money out of education. Responding to budgetary restraints, Shepherd University has followed a similar path.
Between 2003 and today, Shepherd’s tuition has risen over 60 percent—from $2,866 to over $7000 for in-state and considerably more for out-of-state. By cutting public funds for higher education, state policymakers in West Virginia and across the country have increasingly shifted the cost of a public education onto universities, and universities have shifted the burden onto the shoulders of individual students and their families—contributing to a sizable $1 trillion educational debt accrued by American students over the past decade.
The liberal arts also have a bad reputation in the current market-driven environment—in part because they fail to fit neatly within the prevailing political economy that values more technical, efficient workforce training. One can see this when Microsoft founder Bill Gates suggested that state funding for education should not subsidize public university departments that are not geared toward producing more technical-oriented jobs, or when political leaders like Governor Patrick McCrory, N.C., echoed that sentiment and questioned public support of liberal arts majors.
Market driven values and corporate culture impact life inside liberal arts universities also. The Chronicle of Higher Education showed that there is an increasingly close nexus between university leaders and industry, especially in terms of public university presidents serving on corporate boards and an emphasis on business-university joint ventures. Since the 1970s, as a heart breaking graphic in the Washington Post recently illustrated, the distribution of four-year degrees has decidedly shifted from the social sciences and history to business—with business now more than doubling all other fields of study. In my own experience here at Shepherd, many students and their parents at open houses imagine the university in purely instrumental terms: the university is seen as a place where students pay to learn skills that will help them “get a job” so they can make “more money.”
All of these political, economic and social pressures contribute to the difficult environment. They create serious challenges to the integrity and viability of liberal arts degrees and public liberal arts universities.
It may be unpopular to say this at a public liberal arts university, but the liberal arts are not primarily about job preparation—especially if job preparation is narrowly defined as a set of technical skills. The liberal arts are much more than simply a means of “getting a job,” even as they prepare students to face on-the-job challenges. Indeed, a 2014 study by the Association of
American Colleges and Universities and the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems showed that liberal arts training helps cultivate flexible problem solvers who can analytically take issues apart and can clearly and creatively communicate solutions and ideas in written and spoken forms, which is exactly what many employers say they want.
Furthermore, at their peak earnings ages, liberal arts majors earn more than technically trained majors and, perhaps even more important, liberal arts college alumni report a greater sense of satisfaction with their education. In short, the liberal arts are life preparation more than job preparation.
Shepherd defines itself as a premier liberal arts university. That is an increasingly difficult mantel to carry in the current political economy. Clarifying what it does and does not mean to be a liberal arts university, and what that practically entails for Shepherd’s future, is a matter worth public consideration.