The Importance of Liberal Arts Education: In a Knowledge-Based Economy
Historically, in the United States, there has always exist a tension in higher education between the education of the person and the achievement of specific and pragmatic objectives. Liberal arts colleges in the United States have traditionally tilted the balance in favor of educating the whole person. Character building was viewed as equal in importance to intellectual development. The core of the liberal arts experience is a commitment to the excitement of learning.
While affirming the enduring value of a liberal arts education, we must also be responsive to the technological and social changes taking place around us. We must be responsive to the social, political, and economic needs of our community, state, nation, and the evolving global society. However, our most effective response should be our passionate desire to learn more about these needs and how society can most effectively respond to them.
We need to be mindful of the economic imperative that change requires investment. An enormous investment is currently being made in communication and information processing technology. Contemporary society urgently needs to adapt to the intended and unintended consequences of that technological investment.
During the past three decades, the work place has changed more dramatically than any other time in the history of the United States. Today, the ability to create new knowledge is quickly over shadowing the importance of manufacturing goods and services.
As the world continues to become more complex, more technological, and more competitive one issue that flows from the literature on higher education is the increasing need for an educated workforce that can meet the needs of a global economy.
A recent Department of Labor report projected that eighty percent of the children beginning kindergarten will eventually enter jobs that doesn’t even exist today. If work continues to change as radically as it has in the recent past, than the question is: How do we prepare today’s students to enter the workforce and become productive citizens?
It’s obvious to many of us that we are witnessing radical changes in the entry-level skills required for jobs as they evolve toward higher-level skills, especially the skills of analytical thinking, problem solving, communication, computation, and working in teams. To be successful in the workplace of the future, individuals will need more than technical training.
A recent report, issued by the National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America Promise (LEAP), indicated that two-thirds of employers say college graduates lack essential skills to succeed in today’s global economy.
The report goes on to say that: College graduates will need more cross-disciplinary knowledge and an advanced set of communication and analytical skills to apply that knowledge to real-world problems. It also urges a more thorough application of liberal education in American colleges and universities.
A liberal arts education will remain the most practical preparation for lifelong employment because it promotes intellectual and personal growth; and it equips the individual to cope with change by being able to adapt to the workplace as it continues to transform.
“The quality of learning, not the possession of a diploma, will determine whether the next generation can keep our economy and democracy strong,” says Association of American Colleges and Universities President Carol G. Schneider. Ms. Schneider goes on to say “It’s time to stop channeling students into narrow tracks that prepare them for an initial job but not for tomorrow’s challenges.”
We should agree, however, that the term “liberal arts education” has a fuzzy meaning for many people. For some, it means many required classes that get in the way of technical training, which some people feel is the only way to prepare for a job. Upon closer observation, however, liberal arts education can be understood as the key to survival in any field that subject to change over time.
It’s true, technical training might give one the “foot in the door” as an entry into the workforce, but a liberal arts education will provide the staying power, serve as a foundation for continuous growth and development; and lead to professional success we all set our sight on.
Today, more than ever, undergraduate students are trying to make a connection between subject and content in the educational marketplace. What students seem to value most is the ability to translate their undergraduate education into better employment opportunities.
For most students, perceived or future success depends on professional preparation in areas such as law, medicine, or business. The fact that the liberal arts are at the root of such disciplines is often lost on today’s career minded students. As a result, students are less inclined to major in the liberal arts.
Conclusion
The shift in the economy from a manufacturing base to one with a knowledge foundation is having an impact on higher education in significant ways. More importantly, the basic goals and purposes of higher education seem to be in flux. However, one constant remains true today colleges and universities can no longer afford to graduate students ill-prepared for a persistently changing workplace and a global economy.
History Of Business Administration Education
Business administration school is a university-level institution that educates learners on such topics as accounting, finance, marketing, organizational behavior, strategy planning, and quantitative methods. Most business administration schools have experienced well-qualified faculties, and efficient managements. In 1881, the first ‘collegiate business school’ was founded in Wharton.
Business Schools before World War II were mostly “schools of commerce” and were conducted in relatively low esteem. After the Second World War and especially after 1960, Business Administration Schools began to grow rapidly. They are often known as university graduate schools. MBA degrees originally occurred in the United States of America, due to the fast industrialization growth that made it essential for companies to use scientific approaches to teach management. The first MBA degree was offered by Dartmouth College in 1900. Business schools have mushroomed and flourished in all states and countries thus, making them feasible for individuals who work during the day to take classes and earn degrees at night.
Since 1988, business schools have changed deans, altered curriculums, and stressed new expertise among their students. A MBA degree has opened abundant opportunities for its bearers. Presently, nearly all business positions require an MBA degree as the minimum qualification. This includes business managers in marketing, finance, human resources, operations, and information technology. Investment entities, banking companies and a number of management consulting firms prefer employing MBA graduates specializing in the field of finance. These graduates are well conversant in their respective fields. For industries such as media and entertainment, an MBA is not a necessity, but it is considered an additional asset.
There are wide ranges of options among the different academic institutions that offer business courses. Various sites are available wherein detailed information about all the specialization fields are mentioned along with their course details. These sites also offer information regarding the universities that are well qualified and offer competent MBA programs.
Six Degrees of Separation – A Short Analysis
The motivation comes from the book, “Six Degrees of Separation” by John Guare. In this book, its explained that two people in the world, who may or may not know each other and geographically separated, are connected through a maximum of six other people. Why does this have to be six degrees and not any other random number? We shall analyze this particular value mathematically in this article.
Mathematically speaking, lets assume that a person knows 100 non-redundant people. Non-redundant meaning the person knows 100 people who are distinct and that there is no duplication. Lets assume that each of these 100 people, in addition, know 50 non-redundant people.Then each of the 50 people know another 50 non-redundant people and so on up to six degrees. This multiplies out to be 100x50x50x50x50x50 totaling to a sum of 31.250 billion people. However, the population of the world is 6 billion, which means that one is connected to everybody else through a maximum of 6 levels of “contacts”.
The calculation of the degrees of separation includes the principles of demography and population theory, which includes Malthusianism concepts in a broader sense. The calculation, though simple and heuristic, is applicable and is robust in considering the demographic transitions and the optimum, stable and stationary population models. Thus, this number is distinct from the methodological mathematical studies and model data. Analogies could be derived from physics and mathematics – an element, the degree of freedom could be exploited for our analysis. Taking a closer looking at the mathematics, the number of degrees of freedom is a measure of the number of independent equations one needs to completely understand the situation from a mathematical standpoint. An airplane has six degrees of freedom – three to get the coordinates of the center of the plane, and three for roll, pitch, and yaw. Simply put., the “degrees of freedom” are the independent pieces of information (variables) needed to exactly specify the state of a system. For instance, a particle moving in three dimensional, like the airplane example, space has 6 degrees of freedom. Degrees of freedom are used to minimize the error of the results in statistics.
Additionally, “Six Sigma”, a statistical quality improvement methodology also derives the factor six as a core parameter. In six sigma, the sigma denotes the standard deviation of a population. Here, we are talking about pure statistics. Six sigma simply means that when the differences fall within six times the standard deviation (which is the formal term for the difference) from the average value (mean), then we chance to find that 99.9999% of the samples pass the quality test. This also involves some amount of mathematics. Extrapolating the math behind the quality problem, one could easily see the correlation between six sigma from a quality perspective as well as the six degrees or individuals, who are samples in a population. So, we have a 99.99999% probability (chance), that we would definitely know a random person in some corner of the world, if and only if we could find the 6 individuals, who could lead us to the individual we are interested in.
Recent research has shown that the type of interconnectivity required to make the Six Degrees of Separation idea work relies upon networks that benefit on their being “well connected”. This means you need to be closely connected to an individual, who has connections to groups that are far removed from yourself. However, in this increasingly interconnected world, isolations are a rare phenomenon, which is also the benefit of human evolution and the rise of societies. Examining the characteristics and patterns of networking involves analyzing the collective dynamics of large numbers of people, than individual actions and characteristics. This produces a well connected robust graph. Empirical research on computing the average path length among instant messenger users has concluded this value to be 6.6. It is found that people tend to network more with each other when they share similarities in age, language, and location, and that cross-gender networking are both more frequent and of longer duration than conversations with the same gender.
The uniqueness of social networking is that they allow individuals, not only to meet “strangers”, but also enable the users to articulate and make their social networks visible. This can result in connections between established among individuals, that shortens the search path in the networking graph. Another spin off from the six degrees concept is the “small world phenomenon”. If one invites all of his/her friends to join a community and they in turn invite theirs to join and so on, then through such acquaintances, one could reach the whole world within the six degrees. Research has also shown that the complicated computer networks like the Internet and social circles share several traits, including the ability to transmit information from one node to any other node in six or fewer steps. Variations in networks exist, but mathematically six degrees is adequate enough for the human face of networking.