Teun J. Dekker

European advocates of Liberal Arts and Sciences education often claim that this educational model is highly effective at teaching students a range of generic, transferable, or 21st-century skills, which are thought to be vital for success in the labour market of the future. However, there is little empirical research into whether and how these programs do so. This paper examines how European Liberal Arts and Sciences students experience how their programs teach them generic skills. It is based on a significant number of interviews with students from a range of programs across Europe. It concludes that a multidisciplinary curriculum with significant freedom of choice, active student-centred pedagogy with open assessment, and an emphasis on academic community are experienced as key features that foster the development of generic skills. This finding both confirms and expands the current theoretical understanding of generic skills acquisition, as well as yielding several suggestions for how other programs might teach these skills better.

This paper compares the employment outcomes of liberal arts graduates from Dutch university colleges with those of their peers who pursued conventional, subject-specific bachelor’s degrees. Using data from the Dutch National Alumni Survey, the analysis includes 14,933 respondents who completed a master’s programme at a research university, with 210 of them holding a university college degree. Logistic, multinomial, and OLS regression analyses were performed on six labour market outcomes: employment status, time to first paid job, vertical match, horizontal match, vertical and horizontal match combination, and hourly wage from regular work. Propensity score matching was used as a robustness check. The results show that holding a university college degree is not associated with any distinct advantages or disadvantages in the job market. While a liberal arts bachelor’s degree has a negative effect on obtaining employment in STEM professions, no statistically significant differences, neither negative nor positive, were found in other outcomes. This suggests that university colleges do not lack the capacity to prepare students for the labour market.

This chapter distils a concrete educational agenda from the seven democratic virtues that have been analysed in this book. Each of these virtues is associated with a key feature of liberal arts and sciences education in Europe that contributes to its development. Together, these features explain the civic potential of liberal education. By exploring them, an agenda for higher education reform emerges to make the teaching of civic virtue a more central part of university education in Europe. The chapter presents this reform agenda and considers several strategies for its implementation in traditional programmes. It also discusses the book’s implications for the future of democracy and democratic conversations.

This book argues that the liberal arts and sciences (LAS) model of education can inspire reform across higher education to help students acquire crucial civic virtues. Based on interviews with 59 students from LAS programmes across Europe, the book posits that LAS education can develop a range of citizenship skills that are central to the democratic process. The interviews provide insight into how studying LAS prepares students for citizenship by asking them to reflect on their education, what it taught them, and how it did so. Building on these insights, seven key democratic competencies are identified and linked to concrete educational practices that foster them, leading to an agenda for higher education reform. Ultimately arguing for making the teaching of civic virtue a more central part of university education in Europe, this book will appeal to researchers, educators, and politicians with an interest in education policy, philosophy of education, and democratic theory, as well as concerned citizens. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This chapter introduces the concept of civic virtue and its importance for contemporary democracies. It then explains how civic virtue is crucial for overcoming many challenges modern democracies face. Furthermore, it specifies what sorts of skills, knowledge, and attitudes citizens must possess to optimally participate in the democratic process. It presents five fundamental democratic values and shows how they can be modelled in the idea of a democratic conversation, i.e., a special kind of exchange between citizens that represents the essential values of democracy. Good citizens are defined as those who can participate in such conversations, and the civic virtues required for democracy are those that enable this participation.

This chapter examines the importance of having a sense of the other, i.e., an understanding of the backgrounds, cultures, and beliefs of others for democracy. In democratic conversations, people with different backgrounds, interests, and ideas come together to agree, as far as possible, on solutions to shared problems. To do so, they must understand their fellow citizens. Having a diverse student body, in which students from many different cultures come together, can contribute to this. In liberal arts and sciences programmes, moreover, the curriculum, the methods of education, and the sense of community work together to create what has been called an international classroom. This chapter shows that students from liberal arts and sciences programmes believe that studying in such an environment helps them cultivate a sense of the other.

This chapter presents the main aim of the book, which is to show how liberal arts and sciences education can help students develop the civic virtue they will need to be good and effective citizens, based on interviews with students who are experiencing this kind of education. It then describes the liberal arts and sciences model and traces its history in European higher education. It also explains how the study was conducted, introducing the interview process and the data-analysis methodology. Lastly, it provides an overview of the structure of the book.

This chapter argues that it is important for citizens to understand the problems society faces. If they have a basic understanding of the issues, they will be able to make more meaningful contributions to democratic conversations and will find it easier to assess the contributions of others. Including general education courses in the curriculum can help students acquire knowledge about these matters. While different programmes have different requirements, and general education programmes can serve a variety of educational purposes, many aim to inform students about contemporary issues and stimulate them to take an interest in current affairs. This chapter will also consider whether a so-called great books approach to general education is superior in cultivating this virtue to an approach based on the study of social problems that is prevalent in European liberal arts and sciences programmes.

One might accept the importance of civic virtue for democracy but deny that it is the role of universities to teach it. Hence, this chapter makes the case that cultivating civic virtue ought to be one of the aims of higher education. It does so partly by reflecting on the general purposes of education and the role of higher education within an education system, but also by considering and rejecting several objections to this claim. These objections include democratic arguments, such as ones that appeal to a fear of elitism and academic arguments concerning the scientific mission of universities.