McKinsey predicts that AI will significantly reshape the job market, leading to 14% of global labor force, which is roughly 375,000,000 world population by 2030. Unlike the industrial revolution, this shift will not only impact blue collar jobs, but also high-paid white-collar professions such as doctors, paralegals, accountants and engineers. Some investors in Silicon Valley even predict that within three to five years, traditional engineers will disappear, with supervision positions remaining at best.
The questioned undergraduate education
Meanwhile, the past three years have seen a heated debate on the value of college education, given the high cost, time commitment and inability to land a job after graduation. The simple question is: is it still worth going to college?
*Hangzhou Dipont School Of Arts And Science
We are at a threshold of a great change. What is the future of college education? What is the college education worth of our pursuit? I believe that liberal arts education will provide us a solution. A recent Bloomberg editorial argued that college education is more than just vocational education. Humanities, in particular, have a higher calling: to encourage critical thinking, form habits of mind, broaden intellectual horizons – to acquaint students with “the best that has been thought and said” in Matthew Arnold’s phrase. Therefore, many higher education institutions require students to take a set of core liberal arts courses, regardless of their major.
Take Princeton University for instance: as a world-class university, a commitment to the liberal arts is at the core of Princeton’s mission. President Christopher L. Eisgruber welcomed incoming students during the annual Opening Exercises ceremony last fall, sharing his hopes that Princeton’s commitment to the liberal arts will provide them with a “transcendent education.”
Eisgruber received his A.B. in physics from Princeton in 1983. He then earned a M.Litt in politics at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and a J.D. cum laude at the University of Chicago Law School.
*Wuxi Dipont School Of Arts And Science
He once said that the reason why he chose Princeton for his undergraduate study was that it provided him with the opportunity to explore multiple disciplines. While majoring in physics, Eisgruber argued that what influenced him most in his academic career were courses such as constitutional law, political theory and comparative literature.
Last year, the Harvard Gazette published a podcast episode where an economist, an educator, and a philosopher make the case that a liberal arts education is as essential as ever in today’s job market. As the economist David Deming in the podcast said:
What kind of education will prepare you not just for your first job, but for the rest of your life? The conclusion?
A liberal arts education is teaching you not a set of specific competencies in some specific thing, but rather giving you a set of tools to teach you how to think about the next problem over the horizon that we don’t have an answer to now because it hasn’t come around yet.
The prediction of liberal arts education
What is certain for now is the uncertainty of the future. We cannot predict what profession will be the “it” job in five to ten years, but what is certain is that a liberal arts education will equip us with the flexibility to adapt.
*Dipont-KCS International Acdemy
While AI makes past knowledge available at one’s fingertips, liberal arts education train students to creatively think, problem-solve, synthesize information, manage ambiguity, ask questions and come up with new ideas, as Cecilia Gaposchkin, a history professor at Dartmouth College said. It will indeed, provide us with a “transcendent education” that is critical to the future success of us and the society.
繁体
