Liberal Arts Education Fareed Zakaria Summary

In an era of ever-increasing costs of college expenses, concerned parents and stressed high school students face one crucial decision with important trade-offs to consider. Many worry that the intellectual and personal benefits of a collegiate liberal arts education are substantially outweighed by the overarching social stigma that such a degree is obsolete. Furthermore, they must consider the financial burden and student loans that they will likely incur as a result of this type of education as opposed to more affordable public universities. For these families, their minds spinning with unanswered questions, author Fareed Zakaria takes the complicated matter and confronts it head-on, arguing that a liberal arts-educated population is a necessity …show more content…
He admits that engineering students do start out with a higher salary than liberal arts students just after graduation, but that this gap narrows over time, giving neither profession a clear advantage over the other. Thus, he concludes, a liberal arts education has no significant drawbacks and should be pursued for its benefits, both personal and …show more content…
He spends the bulk of the book arguing that the modern workforce “isn’t just about math and science anymore. It’s about creativity, imagination, and, above all, innovation.” Zakaria is a staunch believer that a liberal arts education equips the present-day student with tools necessary to market themselves and succeed in any career of their choosing, because they have the ability to think and communicate. However, the beauty of a liberal arts education, as he himself implies in the beginning of the book, is that it has no intrinsic automatically applicable value. Liberal arts students learn for the sake of learning, read for the sake of reading, and write for the sake of developing their own schools of thought and systems of beliefs. The goal of such an education is to educate the mind and nurture the soul, to achieve a sense of arete and become the best individual one can be. To compare an education that prepares the student for one job post-graduation to a liberal arts education in terms of their practical value is, in its core, hypocritical. The liberal arts offer a skill set that enriches lives and allows students to fully experience life; to fully appreciate this as a field of thought is to ignore the necessity and applicability of it and to just read, write, and think for the sake of learning. Zakaria’s logic may assuage the