Although with a fantastical bent, one of the underlying messages of the movie is that it is those who can be creative, who can bring ideas from other areas into their work in invigorating and unexpected ways, who can appreciate the value of play and imagination, who are most likely to be truly successful in whatever they do in life.
I have heard it said (although I don’t have a statistic to demonstrate it) that, while many business and other vocational majors earn more immediately after graduation, those who run the companies they work for are very likely to have degrees in some discipline or domain within the liberal arts. But certainly there is some good anecdotal evidence, just as there is evidence that CEOs value liberal arts graduates.
It is these considerations that also explain the value of getting a vocational degree at a university that has a strong liberal arts component, and not blowing off such core or general education requirements as “irrelevant to my major.”
I’ll be teaching a freshman core course this Fall entitled “Faith, Doubt and Reason.” I wonder how useful it is to actually explicitly emphasize some of these points to students. Many, in my experience, have been told that they are getting a degree in order to get a job of a certain sort, and thus should focus on skills, not on “becoming broadly educated.” I’d be interested to hear what others who are or have been students or professors think about this.
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