Advantages of a Liberal Arts Education
"If there is a difference to be made
in civilization, it must spring from liberal education."
Terry Sanford
Fundamental to UNCW's MALS program is its mission to prepare its students to meet the many complex challenges facing our society, the world community, and, closer to home, our own local and regional communities, most of which do not fall within the strict confines of a single discipline or professional degree program, but rather require a broader interdisciplinary perspective. For example, philosophy and religion, science, history, literature, and social science perspectives enable people to address ethical issues such as those raised by the recently reported research on animal cloning. MALS students think through these contemporary questions.
Indeed, employers are particularly attracted by graduates of MALS programs because they have been uniquely prepared to address the challenges of a complex world. Through 1995 there were more than 25,000 graduates of MALS programs nationwide. They reflect a national trend among adults who pursue life-long learning. Though a good number of MALS students are retirees, others are employed, full and part-time, and seek a way to fit education into busy adult lives. Balancing work, family and education is no easy task, which may explain why these adults look for flexible programs in which to continue their education. Clearly, the graduate of a MALS program is one who can manage his or her own complicated personal life in order to fit in the time to pursue a graduate degree. Corporations faced with the need to "downsize" over the next century will clearly look for individuals who are flexible, creative, and capable of managing complicated schedules and demands. As such, "though GLS programs are advertised as 'non-professional,' it is becoming more apparent that as they increase a person's ability to think critically and creatively, to be sensitive to values, and to become aware of larger cultural issues, these programs influence a person's life on the job, in the community, and at home perhaps more than any other graduate program existing today" (Richard Guzman, Integrating Knowledge and Action: A Workbook for Graduate Liberal Studies Programs). Come to think of it, nothing less than American civilization and the cultivated understanding of its diverse peoples and folkways, its landscape and physical resources, its continuing evolution as a social experiment should convince any snickering cynic about the value of the liberal arts. However unselfconsciously, early American colonists must have intuitively understood the value of what we now recognize as the liberal arts in domesticating what was often described as a "savage and desert wilderness." In fact, it's not entirely fanciful to think of the earliest colonial settlements as open classrooms or informal campus communities, though daily assignments involved a constant array of unanticipated problem-solving situations and a passing grade was more often than not survival itself.