So You Majored in Computer Science . . . 

Suddenly, headlines about unemployed computer science majors are everywhere. 

Poor kids. 

Especially because—so it appears—many computer science majors did not choose the subject out of passion but followed their elders’ advice about how to build a stable career. Neither their diligence nor deference failed them, but their universities: These have steadily relaxed the obligation to take classes across different disciplines, letting students put ever more of their eggs into a single basket like computer science. Instead, colleges ought to reestablish requirements that students receive a deep grounding in subjects across the liberal arts and sciences. 

This argument might seem counterintuitive, since many college administrators argue that higher education should become narrower, responding to the collapse of the computer science job market with calls for focus on the skilled trades. But is it wise to prepare youths only for plumbing or masonry when both the United States and China are booking major progress on humanoid robots? 

After all, an American can expect to work at least 40 years after graduating from college. Over the past 40 years, major industries have waned and waxed: Nuclear power collapsed after the near-disaster at Three Mile Island in 1979 but is rising again thanks to surging demand for electricity; the military faced major cuts at the end of the Cold War and is now expanding again in the face of Chinese hostility. Today’s high schoolers will face not just those humanoid robots, self-driving cars, and prefabricated houses, which threaten architecture and construction jobs, but technologies still unimagined. 

In the face of so much change, proponents of technical programs only can argue that graduates prepared for a first opportunity can adapt on the job later. This seems like a terrible value: the price of a four-year degree to prepare for a first job, which now lasts an average of two to three years. 

This is where the liberal arts and sciences can help. 

Over a 40-year career, a professional must master many different skills. A liberal arts curriculum trains students to do so by requiring a variety of subjects like math, literature, and foreign languages. The practical benefits are obvious: A firm might send an engineer to work on a project in Quebec. He would need not only to be a good engineer but also to develop a working knowledge of French. Even if he learned Italian or German in college, he still would have developed the skills to learn a language—how to memorize vocabulary, to drill pronunciation, to budget time. Though someone who never took a second language also could learn French, it would be much harder, especially under time pressure. 

Troublingly, colleges are relaxing requirements to master subjects outside the major: Data from the latest cycle of the What Will They Learn?® initiative released this week show that only 54% of colleges and universities require a math class, and 23%, literature. This compares with 62% and 37.5%, respectively, in the 2011–2012 cycle. Even fewer require a single cohesive set of classes, or core curriculum. Roosevelt Montás, head of Bard College’s Chang Chavkin Center for Liberal Education and Civic Life, warned, “A core curriculum reflects a faculty’s willingness to take responsibility for articulating a coherent and intentional vision of what an educated person should know. To relinquish that responsibility to students is a kind of malpractice—asking them to curate for themselves the part of their education that demands precisely the intellectual maturity and breadth they lack.” 

Montás makes a crucial point: Universities must not only require many subjects but also set rigorous expectations. If the Quebec-bound engineer had stumbled through only a single mediocre Italian class—such as one with movies substituting for vocabulary tests—his efforts to learn French would prove equally inadequate. 

Standards matter! 

Crucially, while 46% of colleges and universities do not require a math class per the definition of What Will They Learn?®, this happens at 76% of those institutions, not because they lack a requirement on paper but because students can satisfy it by taking a class “with little college-level math content.” For example, Notre Dame allows students to satisfy its “Quantitative Reasoning” requirement with a course titled “Math and Social Justice.” 

Weakening standards are especially troubling because requiring courses in many different subjects is a distinctly American practice. Most universities in Europe and Asia make students pursue a single subject over the course of a bachelor’s degree. It is not hard to see the connection between an economy’s innovativeness and teaching students to adapt to many different fields—America has long been a leader in both. Indeed, other countries are beginning to see the value of the American model: For example, in 1998, universities in the Netherlands began opening dedicated liberal arts colleges “inspired by Liberal Arts and Sciences programs in the United States” and are beginning to contemplate faculty-wide core courses. 

Seen in this light, American universities’ movement in the opposite direction threatens the country’s innovativeness and graduates’ economic prospects. To reverse this trend, universities need to rebuild requirements for serious arts and sciences courses.