A Gen Z Argument for Liberal Arts: Revisiting our Education Value

“I should have majored in philosophy instead of economics,” my good friend and fellow alumni told me over dinner. He has recently taken fancy to the Socratic method to finding truth and has found that many of his coworkers do not seem as interested in trying to find out truth. Instead, these coworkers only try to find the solution, but not the underlying necessity for that solution or why it matters. This is a common plight for my fellow Gen Zers who are trying to find meaning in a post-modern world one TikTok dance at a time, for now.

Gen Zers are in an interesting position. We are the first digitally native generation in a postmodern western culture, which by happenstance coincides with the most lonely and isolated generation with unprecedented suicide rates. Correlation does not mean causation, but being the political animals we are, it is strange to find hyper connectivity not leading my generation to more meaning. It has instead, led to Gen Z having a meaning crisis.

I have had similar conversations with some of my Gen Z peers as we started to join the workforce since graduation. When I talk to them about their values and how they live them out, many seem to have not thought, written, or talked about these often in detail. Instead, their education focused on training for market needs. This is fine if we have decided that education is just an economic signal. As someone with not just a large personal value, but a large familial value in learning, making university only a taxpayer funded training ground for the economy  would devalue education and fragment our shared values. If us younger generations are not learning why we do things a certain way, or how to think about what a good life looks like with examples, then will we and our communities not fall prey to the false idols that present themselves as the good life?

This is not the value of education I think our society has traditionally held. Even though everyone’s parents tell them to go to college to get a good job, it is also to become a well-rounded, educated, and informed citizen who can handle responsibility in our communities and live a good life. If university is only workforce training, what “marketable degrees” could be sent to vocational schools and cost a fourth of the price and time? However, incentive structures both in the institutions and from their client’s parents seem to not be in line with this. For example, grade inflation can be attributed to schools having to compete against other schools for students to get hired. If my school gives me an A whereas a tougher school gives me a B, then an employer who does not know the toughness of schools will screen out the B school earlier, even if I learned the material better at the B school. Because of the focus on after college performance and incentives like this, the education of Gen Z has had limited exposure to a good education of non-ideological humanities, which if taught correctly would help start the inquiry to a meaningful good life.

General education courses try to broaden horizons, but most students think they are blow-off classes. They see these classes as obstacles to attaining their “marketable degree.” Thus, students are incentivized to find the correct answer, instead of sitting in the uncomfortable nuisance that arises when discussing what values one should hold to live a good life. These opportunities to discuss the ancient reasoning behind the Socratic method, George Washington’s emulation of Cincinnatus as an American ideal, Shakespeare’s take on the human condition, I digress…, are discounted because students do not know their importance. Gen Z needs more than a good paying job and an incomplete nihilistic view of the past and future of our traditions, culture, and society to create a meaningful life.

Yes, higher education is a leading cause of bringing people out of poverty. This should be praised and acknowledged. However, there is a distinction between training a cog for the machine, and training not only a cog, but also an individual person with the capabilities to think about and discuss critically those philosophies that lead to a good life. If the younger generations are not educated to write, think, discuss, and disagree on the values and virtues they hold and how those compare to others both present and past, then they might completely dismiss them. Thus, thinking they know better than millennia of natural trial and error without knowing what works.

A liberal arts education, such as the one my friends and I enjoyed at Claremont McKenna, helps attain this education. Where students can learn both technical skills and those non-economic processes whose shoulders we now stand. A student who is proactive enough with a wholistic education has as much capability of finding a good job as one who only focuses on one discipline and is more anti-fragile to life. CMC was Wall Street Journal’s #5 college because 70% of the score was based on student outcomes. Yet, one-third of classes are general education, one-third is degree (50% economics students), and one-third is anything the student wants in any discipline. Whereas most universities silo kids into their colleges with limited discipline mobility unless it is a formal minor.

Thus, because of adverse incentives and societal views on education, coinciding with the dissolution of familial structures meant to help teach values, and unserious cross-discipline learning, Gen Z is taught to live on bread alone, not a fruitful and meaningful life with bread. Therefore, we need to revisit our purpose for spending millions and charging high tuition costs, when younger generations only know education’s product, the ROI, not the process it is supposed to instill. Maybe then we can think to not ask what can be done for us, but what we can do for others.

 -Grant A. Braught