English 101
“The New Liberal Arts” is an article written by Sanford J. Ungar, who is a president of Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland. In the beginning of his article, Ungar wrote, “Hard economic times inevitably bring scrutiny of all accepted ideals and institutions, and this time around the liberal arts education has been especially hard hit.” In other words, Ungar means that recent economic recessions have made a huge impact on what people think of going for a liberal arts degree. In his essay, Ungar lists seven misperceptions and how he reacts to them. The most common misperception that Ungar identified is that liberal arts degrees are no longer affordable. The cost for liberal arts education is very expensive while most families are struggling with the economic is going down. Thus, the second misperception is, with a liberal arts degree, it is hard for graduates to find a good job. Moreover, liberal arts degree seems to be irrelevant and unimportant especially for low income families and first-generation college students. Other misperceptions pointed out by Ungar are: the STEM (science, technology, engineer, math) are what people need to learn right now instead of arts, American education system is too old-fashioned to stick with liberal arts education, and while the cost for liberal arts education is very high, the outcome of appears to show no gain in productivity for the ways graduates do their work. Finally, Ungar states that one of the misperception is because the United States is being led by a liberal Democrat, who seems to bring more problems to the country than solving the existing problems, so it is better for the young adolescence not to follow that same road. Among Ungar’s entire list of misperceptions, I found several of them are strongly disagreeable because he is a president of a liberal arts college, so it’s undeniable that he holds biases, and personally, I think whether to go for a liberal arts degree is mainly an individual