Liberal Arts Grads Finally Make the Grade With Firms
As recently as three or four years ago, if you spent your college career burrowing into English literature or Picasso’s paintings and then went looking for a job in business, you might have had trouble getting the time of day--let alone an appointment--with many top corporate recruiters.
Headhunters wanted to talk to business and economics majors, or techno-wonks from applied sciences departments. Liberal arts? Not the flavor of the day.
No longer.
In the super-tight job market of today’s expanding economy, even firms on the cutting edges of technology cannot sign up enough computer science or electrical engineering or business majors to meet their needs. As a result, more and more businesses have broadened their recruiting efforts to include once-shunned liberal arts students. Latin majors are hot. Career placement advisors are thrilled.
“In economic terms, you have a supply-and-demand situation. There’s more demand than we have supply,” said James McBride, director of career planning and placement at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. When corporate recruiters bump against the shortage, “their first fallback is business or commerce majors but the next fallback is liberal arts.”
When Arthur Andersen, the consulting firm, took 15 graduates from UVA’s College of Arts and Sciences this year, for example, there were economics and science majors among them, as well as students from art history, government and foreign relations.
With the shortage of workers, Lynn Pearson, director of career services at Whittier College, said employers “have to be more open to liberal arts degree students” than in the past.
To the surprise of some, such graduates are proving successful. “Our kids are trainable. They have the soft skills, the transferable skills,” said Judy Fisher, director of the career development center at Occidental College, the small and well-regarded liberal arts school in Eagle Rock. “They are looking beyond content skills to the broader liberal arts skills--to writing, critical thinking and problem-solving.”
Uneasy as companies may have been when they first ventured into liberal arts recruiting, McBride said, “Now, they are beginning to say: ‘Wow, we’ve found a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.’ ”
Tapping Into ‘Untapped Majors’
Matt Birnbaum, who directs the career center at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, said corporate recruiters have found that such “untapped majors” as biology, psychology, physics and chemistry develop qualities they need in business.
Eleisha Abrams, for instance, graduated from Ursinus College, a small liberal arts school in Collegeville, Pa., near Philadelphia, last May with a major in politics. “I really wanted to do everything” in college, she said, so she began her higher education majoring in English, then switched to French before settling into political science.
Still, before graduation rolled around, she had nearly a dozen job offers in fields ranging from public relations to financial services and marketing. She took a job with the Vanguard Group investment company and now helps employees of the firm’s corporate clients manage their 401(k) retirement accounts.
Though she received six weeks of training and help getting her license as an investment advisor, Abrams said that it is the communications skills she learned in her liberal arts classes that are crucial now. “It’s managing words well,” she said. “The investment community is full of a lot of crazy words, and I have to bring them down to our participants’ level.”
Among Vanguard’s new hires, her background seems typical. In her training class of 16, only three were business majors. The rest had majored in English, psychology and similar fields. There was even one elementary education major.
The pressures forcing corporations to cast a wider net are starkly revealed in national statistics on what Americans are studying in college. For the vast majority of young people earning bachelor’s degrees, it is not computer science or engineering or the other high-tech, hot new fields.
According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, computer science and information technology accounted for only 2% (24,098) of bachelor’s degrees awarded in 1995-96, the most recent year for which figures are available. More than twice as many students earned degrees in English language and literature (50,698), and almost the same was true in the category of visual and performing arts (49,296).
A Steady Rise in Liberal Arts Degrees
Engineering and related technologies accounted for almost 7% of bachelor’s degrees in 1995-96. Yet nearly 11% of all such degrees were awarded in the social sciences and history, another 3% in humanities and 1% in foreign languages.
Business management and related subjects remain popular, with about 20% of all bachelor’s degrees awarded in 1995-96. But police science, with about 2% of all bachelor’s degrees, was about twice as popular as mathematics.
Nor is it a case of lagging indicators. Though the shift toward a service- and information-based economy has been underway for years, the number of college degrees conferred in the broad areas of humanities and social sciences has been rising steadily since the mid-1980s.
By contrast, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in engineering and computer science dropped sharply between 1986 and 1992, the data show, though they have now leveled out.
Computer science grads peaked in 1985-86, at a level almost twice what it is today.
For career development officers, especially at small liberal arts schools, the corporate world’s growing appetite for their graduating seniors can be an almost-giddy experience.
At Ursinus, career services director Carla Rinde said that “it’s been great for people like me. In the early 1990s, parents were calling and students were complaining” that the traditional liberal arts school had failed to prepare its graduates for the world of work. Now, such complaints have faded.
Today, she said, recruiters not only want to talk to her liberal arts juniors and seniors, but they come courting as suitors. “I don’t want to say they’re wined and dined, but they are taken care of. They come with presents! Day planners and stress balls and fun things that keep the student with that employer’s name in mind.”
One 1998 graduate, she recalled, took an internship with the KPMG Inc. accounting firm and returned to campus proudly displaying a company Windbreaker. Last spring, the student took a full-time job with the company.
Even the recruitment literature is focused for this generation of students, Rinde said. “It all looks like a Gap commercial.”
For liberal arts schools like Occidental, “It’s been like a dream,” Fisher said.
After years of struggling just to get corporate recruiters to visit schools such as hers, Fisher was surprised recently when, out of the blue, she received an e-mail inquiry from QB Inc., a small Los Angeles firm that develops digital assets management systems for the entertainment industry and others.
The company wanted to talk about hiring Oxy graduates for anticipated expansion. “I wondered why they hadn’t called Caltech just down the road,” Fisher said candidly.
Firms Point to a Shortage of Talent
QB’s chief executive, Quentin Ellis, has a ready answer. “The name of the game is talent, and there is such a shortage,” he said, that “we’re trying to be creative about the way we bring talent into our company.”
Already, QB has interviewed three Oxy grads: two math majors with computer experience and a physics major. Ellis said that the firm is also interested in students whose training is even further afield, including music majors and others who are good at languages.
He predicted that the company’s work force eventually will be evenly divided between workers with technical backgrounds and those educated in liberal arts.
It is not only high-tech firms and traditional business corporations that are courting liberal arts majors. As teacher shortages have increased over the last few years, local school districts have found that they could not hire enough certified instructors to meet their needs.
As one placement officer in the University of North Carolina system noted, the state graduated 3,500 certified teachers last year but needed 5,000. The same shortages exist almost everywhere, including California, where a class-size reduction program in elementary schools has made the squeeze more intense.
To make up the shortfall, many school systems are recruiting untrained teachers with degrees in liberal arts.
Some districts make a virtue of necessity by asserting that such graduates may have more expertise in the subjects they teach than those who went through education schools.
“Public schools are very willing to talk to most majors” in liberal arts fields now, according to career planning officer Gigi Davis-White at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education.
Predictably, the greatest demand is for math and science majors. Foreign language majors are also in demand with schools.
Surprisingly, while Spanish majors are highly sought after, the sharpest appetite is for Latin majors, according to Davis-White. “People say ‘What? Latin?’ But Latin’s alive and kicking, despite being a dead language,” she said.
Recruiters are eager to find college graduates who majored in Latin because high school students in significant numbers continue to want to study it. Some are attracted to Latin for the mental discipline and for what it teaches about the inner workings of English and many other languages. Latin is also popular with students who may want to go to medical school or specialize in biology or other sciences that use Latin words in their terminology.
Preparing for the Curry School’s annual job fair, Davis-White is pleading with other schools to send students to talk to school system representatives. Still, she says, “I expect to have more recruiters than students.”
