Whether it’s Thanksgiving football, winter break’s College Football Playoffs, or the Super Bowl right around the corner, many college students regularly spend time with friends and family while watching a game. Many also face some well-meaning but loaded questions. As they gather in living rooms awaiting kickoff, a friendly uncle will inevitably ask: “Now, what’s your major, again?” And then, for many, “What are you going to do with that?”
For students studying liberal arts disciplines, let me suggest some powerful answers, and a strategy.
“Dear Uncle,” you can start, “studying the liberal arts is really a lot like football.”
Liberal arts fields often do not connect directly, or obviously, to a given occupation or career path. That doesn’t mean they don’t get you there. Football teams practice, and they don’t just play scrimmages with one another over and over. They work at conditioning and drills, study past games, and cross-train. We collectively have a good faith understanding that these activities produce better football teams. Why can’t the same good faith apply to high quality liberal arts education as a tool to train for varied careers?
When liberal arts students practice reading and writing about complex texts in literature or philosophy, it’s not because we expect them to earn a living explaining the key themes in John Steinbeck or Ayn Rand or William Shakespeare. It’s because, in a variety of ways, the mental habits, strengths, and discipline that these practices cultivate will apply in other settings. Five years past graduation working in a corporate office, these humanities majors will need to understand a competitor’s revealed marketing approach. They’ll need to backward-engineer the underlying motivation and strategy. And they will know how to do this.
Football practice includes drills, going over and over particular plays or patterns of movement until they become second nature, with the goal of developing muscle (and mental) memory that will allow players to react instinctively in the barely controlled chaos of a game. Liberal arts students similarly engage in various modes of analysis, such as understanding stylized economic models, parsing the precise syntax of languages, or learning two-dimensional representations of anatomy or brain structures in anthropology or psychology. We teach these models for their own sake, for the joy and excitement of learning, but also to train our students. Just as football players run drills so that they can execute flawlessly and adapt rapidly when they need to deviate from the planned play, liberal arts education gives student a foundation to analyze situations and move beyond a controlled problem into the chaos of the real world.
The benefits of this approach are blindingly obvious in football. A coach who doesn’t adequately drill and condition his players will lose a lot of games. The same relationship holds for higher education in the liberal arts, though it’s not quite as easy to see (an economics degree helps).
Despite numerous claims that liberal arts education doesn’t pay off, the evidence suggests otherwise. According to data collected by the US Census Bureau[1], graduates from liberal arts majors at The University of Texas at Austin earn an average of approximately $68,000 five years after graduation, and those earnings will keep growing. Liberal arts education doesn’t regularly create 28-year-old millionaires, but it does result in young workers with earnings nearly 40% above the median for all workers with no college degree ($48,000 according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics[2]).
If we trust that football training is working because a team wins games, we should also be willing to believe, as a starting point, that liberal arts education pays off. Students majoring in the liberal arts will be well prepared for many careers, because they’ve been trained, conditioned, and have practiced how to tackle complexity, interpret ideas beyond the surface level, and debate and discuss issues with nuance and importance. And that, football coaches and family members alike will agree, is a winning strategy.
Ann Huff Stevens is the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and David Bruton Jr. Regents Chair in Liberal Arts.
[1] Data from US CENSUS Bureau, Post-Secondary Employment Outcomes, converted to 2024 dollars. https://lehd.ces.census.gov/applications/pseo/?state=08&type=earnings&compare=postgrad&specificity=2&institution=08°reelevel=05&gradcohort=0000-3&filter=50&program=52,45
[2] https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2024/median-weekly-earnings-of-full-time-workers-with-only-a-bachelors-degree-1541-in-q2-2024.htm#:~:text=Full%2Dtime%20wage%20and%20salary,degree%20had%20earnings%20of%20%241%2C057.