President Danny Anderson Webinar Discusses the Value of a Liberal Arts Education

By Samuel King

Liberal arts degree is not worthless, but has just as much value as a business degree in its own way. Trinity University President Danny Anderson made that argument during a webinar On Thursday.

Anderson was joined by Trinity's Vice President​ for Strategic Communications and Marketing, Tess Coody-Anders (’93), in a conversation about the value of a liberal arts education in the 21st century.

They mentioned that Trinity students with liberal arts degrees tend to have lower starting salaries than those with business degrees. However, “your starting salary does not predict your final salary," said Coody-Anders. In the long run, people with business degrees tend to have a salary range that plateaus after a certain amount, whereas a liberal arts degree has a bigger salary range, she added.​

“The word ‘liberal’ is often taken as reference to the political parties. It really means to liberate a person to shape his or her own path,” said Anderson. A liberal arts degree is often viewed as a "humanities" degree, which some people see as worthless. Anderson and Coody-Anders countered this view in the webinar. 

Unlike many universities, where humanities classes are mostly taken during the student’s freshman year, Trinity’s curriculum encourages students to take humanities classes well through their senior year. This allows students to take the knowledge learned from their core courses and think about it in a more applicable sense.

Such curriculum design allows for the formation of what Anderson called a "T-person." “This is someone that has a broad range of knowledge, but one area where you have a specific brand of knowledge,” he said. 

​Anderson​ emphasized how having a liberal arts degree from Trinity University would lengthen the broad range of knowledge that the student holds as well as deepen their specific brand of knowledge, resulting in the creation of a more productive employee.

Mike Inco, 21, a junior history major at Trinity, was one of the students who watched the webinar. “I feel much more confident in attaining my liberal arts degree from Trinity University now that I know my degree is not considered to be useless,” he said.

This webinar was one of Trinity's “Learning TUgether” Webinar Series.