The demographic window of opportunity: Liberal education in the new century 

Anthony P. Carnevale, Vice President for Public Leadership, and Jeff Strohl, Research Scientist, both of the Educational Testing Service, point out in this article that society currently is placing a great deal of emphasis on high technology, but high-tech is not where most of the good jobs are.  In fact, high-tech and scientific jobs represent less than 10% of all jobs.  Ironically, technology has replaced a significant amount of the physical and mental work in the technical field, so the workers must excel in the non-repetitive deployment functions.

The management positions of the future will require broad general skills, including quality, variety, customization, customer focus, speed of innovation, and the ability to add novelty and entertainment value to products and services.  Successful workers will have to be creative problem solvers with good communicative and interpersonal skills.  The high-skilled managerial and professional jobs of the future entail non-repetitive functions and overlapping team-based assignments. 

Because management positions will require individuals to think outside of a box, a liberal arts education will remain valuable.  Nevertheless, the market value of a liberal arts bachelor’s degree will not be readily apparent.  General skills, fostered by liberal education, are typically rewarded only after individuals arrive in senior, decision-making positions later in their careers.  While the advantages of a liberal arts bachelor’s degree are apparent latent in a graduate’s professional career, a liberal arts education coupled with graduate or professional school guarantees success.  Especially for women, a graduate education is the “new threshold” to accessing managerial and professional roles. 

The markets have largely failed to see the latent value of liberal education since benefits are  indirect and long-term, and tuition will continue to rise faster than the discretionary incomes of families.  Funding the latent cultural and economic value of liberal education will continue to be a daunting challenge.  Rising cost pressures threaten to make liberal education a “privilege rather than a prerequisite, even though that can only impair our economic performance and put our egalitarian values at risk.”  Thus, liberal arts colleges  will “survive, prosper, and grow” as a result of demographic and economic forces, but the future of liberal education is less clear. 

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