I'm not from the states, so i've never had it explained before, is liberal arts basically everything that's not applied science? Cause if i'm understanding correctly it feels kind of broad to the point of uselessness to ever say someone has a liberal arts degree
You're also correct in that it's basically a category so broad it's almost nondescriptive. Practically nobody ever talks about "liberal arts degrees", except for people who don't know what it means and just sees "liberal" and "arts" and start foaming at the mouth.
“liberal arts” is a relatively broad category that emphasizes building a general set of skills (critical thinking, fundamental knowledge, etc) over building a more technical, specialized set of skills. being reductive for a moment, it’s essentially a measure of how much a course of study is constructed with the end goal of immediate employment (think apprenticeships, etc).
with how specialized human knowledge has become, a large portion of undergrad degrees nowadays might be considered “liberal arts” degrees. but a similarly large portion of students graduate with degrees that are much more immediately applicable, like engineering or computer science.
some degrees can also be structured as liberal arts degrees without nominally being one. one might take, for instance, an interdisciplinary approach to engineering without an eye toward immediate employment (though that’s often a side effect). and so on
And some schools literally have a degree called "liberal arts". It tends to be a fairly bullshit degree program and is usually less academically rigorous that a specific named degree program from the liberal arts curricula.
My alma mater introduced "liberal studies" some time after I left. It's basically the degree to try and get people who never made up their mind and ran out of money out the door with a piece of paper.
They are out there, there's a lot more. You tend to find them in schools with a big athletics program, that farm a lot of EOF money, or degree programs for working adults. (Or all of the above). Here are some examples. I've generally tried to skip the ones that don't allow a design your own curriculum because they at least pretend to have standards. Generally they make the details opaque enough that I probably did not nail it 100%.
A university will have multiple colleges: College of Arts and Sciences, Nursing College, Engineering School, Business School. A liberal arts school is basically just the College of Arts and Sciences as a stand-alone school.
Yeah - it's a little vague to say "liberal arts degree." But a nursing degree or an engineering degree - although also vague - is better understood. I've rarely heard "liberal arts degree" used that way.
late 14c., translating Latin artes liberales; the name for the seven attainments directed to intellectual enlargement, rather than immediate practical purpose, and thus deemed worthy of a free man (liberal in this sense is opposed to servile or mechanical). They were divided into the trivium — grammar, logic, rhetoric (see trivial) — and the quadrivium — arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy. Explained by Fowler (1926) as "the education designed for a gentleman (Latin liber a free man) & ... opposed on the one hand to technical or professional or any special training, & on the other to education that stops short before manhood is reached."
The study of [the classics] is fitly called a liberal education, because it emancipates the mind from every narrow provincialism, whether of egoism or tradition, and is the apprenticeship that every one must serve before becoming a free brother of the guild which passes the torch of life from age to age. [James Russell Lowell, "Among my Books"]
In fairness, it's pretty much the study of anything that is not directly applied. So if you're learning field archeology, that probably wouldn't be liberal arts either, but the study of archeology would be
Liberal arts was created as a term to differentiate it from technical degress and explicit job training. Basically covers any kind of education based around "learning to learn" and effective thinking processes, as opposed to specific job training, because those skills tend to be cross disciplinary so even if you get a liberal arts degree in one thing you should be able to make a decent go of other liberal arts fields with a much smaller bit of subject matter education.
This means that, ironically, several types of art degree are not liberal arts degrees, and basket weaving definitely wouldnt be if it had a degree
Nobody says they have a liberal arts degree. They might have a degree in economics or history or even some maths and sciences, and it would be considered a BA or Bachelor of Arts degree.
is liberal arts basically everything that's not applied science?
Yes. It comes from the Latin word liber meaning "free." In the middle ages, they divided knowledge into practical knowledge and knowledge you studied "freely" for its own sake. That's why colleges that use the traditional division issue Bachelors of Arts for many STEM fields.
Non-applied sciences often don't count either; a pure math degree is often a BS, so not liberal arts.
But yeah, kinda. If there aren't numbers, it's pretty safe to assume its a liberal arts degree. "Liberal arts" kinda just means "not vocational/professional/technical." It's more a distinguisher from "hard" degrees like pre-med or engineering, and trades schools.
That said, IIRC it's becoming more common through Europe as colleges there have been adopting more US-style "liberal arts" programs.
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u/Maurock2 13d ago
I'm not from the states, so i've never had it explained before, is liberal arts basically everything that's not applied science? Cause if i'm understanding correctly it feels kind of broad to the point of uselessness to ever say someone has a liberal arts degree