BY HANK REICHMAN
Yesterday, August 28, the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) released the results of extensive surveys of 501 business executives at private sector and nonprofit organizations and another of 500 hiring managers, which revealed that both groups “express a higher degree of confidence in colleges and universities than does the American public. They also agree upon the value of college and believe that it is both important and worth the investment of time and money.” AACU commissioned the Washington, D.C.-based Hart Research Associates to survey the two groups.
Additionally and consistent with findings from six earlier surveys commissioned by AACU as part of its ongoing Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) initiative, the report, entitled “Fulfilling the American Dream: Liberal Education and the Future of Work,” indicated that “employers overwhelmingly endorse broad learning and cross-cutting skills as the best preparation for long-term career success. When hiring, executives and hiring managers place a high priority on graduates’ demonstrated proficiency in skills and knowledge that cut across majors, and hiring managers are closely aligned with executives in the importance that they place on key college learning outcomes. The college learning outcomes that both audiences rate as most important include oral communication, critical thinking, ethical judgment, working effectively in teams, and written communication.”
Among both executives and hiring managers, 63 percent expressed quite a lot or a great deal of confidence in colleges and universities. The survey also found that 82 percent of executives and 75 percent of managers think completing a college education is “very important” or “absolutely essential.” This includes one in four (26%) hiring managers and an even higher proportion of business executives (33%, a statistically significant difference) who say that a college education is absolutely essential.
According to the report, “When asked to describe the value of a college degree in an open-ended question, both executives and hiring managers most commonly cite the accumulation of knowledge, development of critical thinking and analytical skills regardless of profession, potential for increased earnings, and focus on a goal as factors that make it useful or important for an individual to obtain a college degree today.”
Although alleged demands for “marketable” skills and vocational training have often been emphasized by college and university administrators seeking curricular “reform” (see, for recent examples, UW Stevens Point, UW Superior, and University of Akron), the surveys showed that “the skill and knowledge areas of greatest importance to both business executives and hiring managers when hiring include oral communication, critical thinking, ethical judgment, working effectively in teams, working independently, self-motivation, written communication, and real-world application of skills and knowledge (each ranked by large majorities as very important, with a rating of eight, nine, or 10 on a zero-to-10 scale).”
Interestingly, “only slightly more than half of executives and hiring managers deem the ability to work with numbers and statistics as very important, and only about one in four prioritize proficiency in languages other than English.” Only 60% of executives rated “staying current on changing technology and its applications” as very important.
AACU President Lynn Pasquerella, in an interview with Inside Higher Ed, said, “When we talk about the liberal education, it’s often in terms of lifelong learning and preparing students not only for their first job, but for their last job.”
On May 31, the AACU joined with the AAUP to issue a statement on the importance of the liberal arts. The statement declared:
The American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Colleges and Universities are not disciplinary organizations, but we believe that institutions of higher education, if they are truly to serve as institutions of higher education, should provide more than narrow vocational training and should seek to enhance students’ capacities for lifelong learning. This is as true of open-access institutions as it is of highly selective elite colleges and universities. The disciplines of the liberal arts—and the overall benefit of a liberal education—are exemplary in this regard, for they foster intellectual curiosity about questions that will never be definitively settled—questions about justice, about community, about politics and culture, about difference in every sense of the word. All college students and not solely a privileged few should have opportunities to address such questions as a critical part of their educational experience. And the disciplines of the liberal arts are central to the ideal of academic freedom, as well, because the liberal arts, by their nature, require free rein to pursue truth wherever it may lead. As a result, they provide an intellectual bulwark for academic freedom.
The AACU surveys also confirm what Brian Mitchell recently argued on this blog: “liberal arts education is eminently practical.” Mitchell argued:
The liberal arts prepare students to be mobile and negotiate in a global workforce. That’s why so many history and English majors run global corporations. They think better and understand more deeply the complexities that they face. . . . There’s another way to think about it that translates directly to the needs of the American workforce: Would you rather have an engineer trained narrowly in a field of specialty or one who had that specialty but was also grounded in the liberal arts? One requires some level of additional training to work competitively in a changing marketplace. The other is ready to hire.
To read the full AACU report go here. To read the executive summary go here.
