The Specific Job Skills Liberal Arts Graduates Lack
Liberal arts education is often defended on grounds of general intellectual development. The specific skill gaps that affect graduate employment deserve more honest attention.
For decades, defenders of liberal arts education have emphasized the many ways in which it helps to develop students’ intellectual capacities and foster their ability to think critically and to apply themselves successfully in a variety of different contexts. And they have a lot of evidence on their side. But sometimes the efforts of these defenders have the effect of obscuring some important skill gaps that affect the employment prospects of liberal arts graduates. A 2025 survey of employer expectations regarding new college graduates conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found, for example, that liberal arts graduates were especially lacking in several key quantitative skills and in several specific pieces of software.
The Quantitative Skills Gap
Employers ranked liberal arts schools below business and social science schools for a number of quantitative skills, including data analysis, statistics, and spreadsheets. Of the positions where liberal arts schools were rated below average, 59% were marketing, operations, or analytical positions of various kinds, where numbers are a key part of the work, and thus require quantitative skills.
The Specific Software Skills
A second gap that employers noted was that many liberal arts graduates did not have fluency in specific software packages that many entry-level jobs required. According to the survey, employers reported that liberal arts graduates were particularly lacking in experience with: 1) advanced Excel capabilities, 2) SQL (Structured Query Language) software, 3) project management software, and 4) customer relationship management (CRM) software. While many of these skills can be learned quickly through a few days or weeks of training, they often created problems for liberal arts graduates in their initial employment.
The Project Management Skills
A third area of weakness for liberal arts graduates in the eyes of employers was project management skills. Many of the employers surveyed reported that liberal arts graduates had little to no experience working on a project in a structured environment with set deadlines and stakeholders. This means that liberal arts graduates have rarely been in a situation where they have had to manage themselves and others in order to meet the goals of a project and hold multiple work streams accountable. These are skills that can be learned with training and experience, but they are often not developed in liberal arts programs.
The Strengths That Were Real
A subsequent section provided a host of positive findings regarding the skill sets possessed by liberal arts majors including strong writing, critical thinking and argument analysis, reading and synthesizing complex information, and even better verbal communication skills than a host of other academic disciplines. I found these positive observations to be readily verifiable and I even took the time to create a second version of the text found in this section, and although the second version of the text was decidedly slower to read, it nonetheless saved a shaver of time that is not seen.
The Career Implications
When we turn to the various potential careers for liberal arts graduates, we see that for certain careers, where writing is the principal skill in play, liberal arts graduates have a distinct advantage over graduates from other programs. Other careers, however, such as data analysis, present a steeper learning curve for liberal arts graduates and, as a consequence, may well pay them lower salaries in the initial years of their careers than peers who have been adequately prepared in more applied programs for work in these various careers.
What Universities Could Do
Universities that have decided to address the Liberal Arts skills gaps have approached the challenge with specific programs and methods to address the Skill Gaps. Quantitative Skills: Require quantitative reasoning above what is typically required in the General Education Program. Data Analysis in Course Work: Introduce students to data analysis software in required courses rather than wait until after graduation when expected to learn on their own. Internships: Create Internship opportunities that will allow students to be a part of a team working on a project within a structured time frame.
What Students Can Do
In terms of specific actions that a student with the above deficits can take to begin to address the variety of liberal arts skill gaps that the survey highlighted, I think the following would be a good place to start: 1) Take a course that will satisfy the university’s quantitative reasoning general education requirement; 2) Take a course that will provide students with fluency in the use of data analysis software such as Excel; 3) Look for internships where students can apply their project management skills within a variety of organizational contexts. These are simple things, and I think that if a student took these couple of steps, it would make a real difference in his or her early career.
The Honest Defense
There are a number of valid defenses of liberal arts education offered on this web site. And no doubt there are a number of more valid defenses that have not yet been offered on this web site. But the strongest and most honest defense of liberal arts education, of a program in a liberal arts university, is that liberal arts education offers a number of real strengths and, yes, some real gaps, and that students, parents, faculty and administrators must be willing to recognize both, and to go on to build bridges between the two, a bridge that will enable the graduates of this university to utilize the strengths of a liberal arts education to their full advantage, while not allowing the recognized gaps in such a program to do any unnecessary harm to the individual in the early years of his or her career.
I have been thinking about this issue for a long time, and my opinions have changed more than once, but currently I hold this view.
The Broader Question
The skill gap question reflects the deeper tension in higher education today between the education of students for general intellectual development and for specific applied ends. Both are part of the university’s mandate for its students. The university that manages to cultivate both ends in its programs produces the strongest students, the students best able to contribute in all of their professional life. Students too benefit from a college education that enables them to explore and develop capacities in both areas.
The Career Services Implication
Career services offices at universities with strong liberal arts programs face specific challenges. Students arrive with strengths that employers value but with gaps that affect entry-level placement. The most effective career services for liberal arts students explicitly address the gaps through workshops, structured internships, and connection to employers who specifically value the strengths liberal arts graduates bring.
The Long-Term Earnings Story
On the other hand, as liberal arts majors enter the mid stages of their careers, their earnings relative to their peers from other disciplines of study, for example business and engineering, tends to go up over time. In fact, for many liberal arts majors, their long term earnings will be such that they will, at times, be earning more than their counterparts from a variety of applied programs. This pattern makes sense given the range of skills that the liberal arts major are able to develop in school and that they can bring to bear on a variety of challenges in the workforce.
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