I am the chair of the physics department at St Mary’s College of Maryland. Our program served as one of the case studies of best practices in the report1 of the Joint Task Force on Undergraduate Physics Programs (J-TUPP), summarized by cochairs Laurie McNeil and Paula Heron in Physics Today (November 2017, page 38). The report puts forward a productive vision for improving the career preparation of physics students and provides numerous recommendations, all well supported by research and by theory.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of that issue’s editorial (page 8). The writer professes little enthusiasm for the US higher education system. In particular, he bemoans US universities’ approach of providing a liberal education—that is, using a broad-based curriculum to expose students to a variety of approaches to understanding the world. The editorial substitutes anecdote for systematic evidence, provides personal opinion in place of research-based theory, and confuses some examples of poor implementation with fundamental flaws.
The writer advocates having students spend more time in their major or on a major-centered project instead of taking so-called general education courses. To see the weakness of those propositions, one can look to the evidence readily available in the career outcomes of students who graduate from the most extreme practitioners of the system that the column decries—US liberal arts colleges.
Broad, general studies in multiple fields are the primary hallmark of a liberal education. Liberal arts institutions educate a small fraction (3%) of the total US university student population. However, they produce eventual science doctoral students at twice the rate of other US universities.2 Even on an absolute scale, liberal arts colleges are disproportionately overrepresented on lists of undergraduate programs that are top producers of science doctoral students in general and physics doctoral students in particular.3 Likewise, graduates of liberal arts colleges make up an even more disproportionately large fraction of National Academy of Sciences fellows2 (19%) and Nobel Prize recipients4 (20%).
In the private sector, human resources departments may focus on specific technical skills when hiring students into their first job after graduation. Several recommendations from the J-TUPP report help address educational gaps there. However, a large majority of top management personnel think that a broad range of skills and knowledge are also important for long-term career success; 80% recommend that all college students acquire that knowledge through the liberal arts and sciences.5 Employers sometimes refer to “T-shaped skills”—deep in one field but with a breadth that enables collaboration and application across many fields. The approach recommended in the editorial would cut off the broad arms of the T.
To improve the way physics programs prepare students for their careers, the J-TUPP report provides a well-researched road map of recommendations. To improve the US educational system, the data on career outcomes suggest that rather than moving away from broad-based education outside a student’s major, the system would better serve students by more closely emulating liberal arts colleges.
