A recent report released by the Association of American Colleges and Universities suggests that American schools need to remove the "artificial division" between liberal arts and pre-professional studies.
According to the report, many colleges are not meeting the needs of their students as they do not provide "a practical, liberal education," focusing instead on vocational careers.
"People often say that a liberal-arts education is not practical," said Ross Miller, director of programs for the AACU's Office of Education and Quality Initiatives. "Historically, and even now, we don't think that's true."
The report points out that many of the skills that employers and policy makers seek of college graduates exactly match the goals of liberal-arts education.
"We want liberal education for all students, regardless of major," Miller said. "We're proposing that liberal learning outcomes -- excellent communication skills, analytical thinking, etc. -- can be developed through any program."
Dartmouth has long focused exclusively on these "liberal learning outcomes" and not on pre-professional majors. According to Provost Barry Scherr, curricula at the College aim to give every student a broad intellectual background and not specific vocational training.
Pre-professional majors "can mean that people are more directed on a specific path early on, and thus are less likely to develop a wide range of liberal-arts intellectual skills," Scherr said.
However, even at colleges and universities that do offer pre-professional education, the focus has shifted to building liberal thinking skills. According to Loren Ghiglione, dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, no journalism school can become accredited unless it teaches more than 75 percent of its courses in subjects other than journalism.
"Most students who come to Medill expect to get both a liberal-arts education and experience journalistic skills like writing and reporting," Ghiglione said. "I can't see an undergraduate program focusing solely on journalism--it's more valuable to emphasize a broad, liberal-arts spectrum."
Nationwide, graduate programs are also becoming cognizant of this shift. Lee Witters, pre-medical advisor to Dartmouth undergraduates, pointed out that increasing numbers of applicants to medical schools have not majored in a science. Less than 10 years ago, approximately 80 percent of all medical school applicants majored in biology.
"Especially in our increasingly complex age, we want our physicians to know more than just biology," Witters said. "We want them to be able to read well, write well, know about government and sociology and even think about ethics in their practice."
As a result, the College doesn't offer majors in pre-professional fields like education, medicine or law. This means students must pursue pre-vocational interests through extracurricular activities like the Nathan Smith Pre-medical Society or the Daniel Webster Legal Society to investigate pre-professional opportunities.
In fact, because Dartmouth's education department is commonly perceived as pre-professional, it has faced numerous eradication attempts in the last 50 years.
Each time, the department survived because it allowed the College to offer popular courses on subject matters that might be otherwise unavailable, according to former department chair Robert Binswanger.
Ironically, most of the department's popular courses are not pre-professional. Education 20, for example, covers a broad range of issues facing contemporary education but not the methodology of teaching.
"We're not Sylvania Tech ... we're not teaching people how to fix televisions," Witters said. "We want people to think liberally. As for vocation training, that's what medical school is for."
