Does a liberal arts education prepare you for a practical career?

"Princeton is the largest sandbox you will ever get to play in."

This is how University President Shirley Tilghman describes the experience of learning here. However, it is the hard truth that after four years of playing in the sand, Princetonians must leave the playground in search of a job.

It has long been the University's policy to give students a broad liberal arts education. At least as far back as Woodrow Wilson's tenure as president, classes here focused on developing the mind and the person rather than the skills required for a particular vocation.

Wilson said during his time as university president that Princeton's mission should be oriented around learning for the sake of learning. "What we should seek to impart in our colleges, therefore, is not so much learning itself as the spirit of learning."

However, with the job market as competitive as it is, some question the University's aversion toward career-specific classes. While some schools offer courses of study in journalism, communications, advertising or marketing, so far the University has avoided granting professional degrees or certificates.

As each year's senior class goes through the checkout process, the office of Career Services compiles a poll of what students plan on doing after graduation. Historically, between 60 and 70 percent of each outgoing class is interested in pursuing full time employment.

However traditionally another 25 percent report that they are still looking for jobs, said Associate Director of Career Counseling Services Rebecca Ross.

For the Class of 2002, 25 percent of last year's class had successfully found jobs by the time they filled out this survey; another 10 percent had found yearlong internships.

Tracking down the first job after a liberal arts education is often the largest challenge a student will face in the job market, Ross explained.

"It is a hurdle coming from a liberal arts background," she said, "[but] it's a hurdle that can be overcome. In the long run, you're more adaptable and flexible."

"You're trained to be a more effective leader, a more effective thinker. In the long run you have more ability when you've had more of a broad education."

Ross stressed that extracurricular activities are particularly important when coming from a liberal arts background since that is a situation in which you get to apply the general knowledge gained from coursework.

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There are, nonetheless, some companies that will not visit Princeton, instead choosing to spend their time at places with undergraduate business schools. However, if a Princeton student were to apply for a job at one of these companies, they would still be seriously considered, said Ross, it is just a matter of the student having to make the first move.

"On the job training makes sense to have on the job," said Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Howard Dobin.

"It's not our job to train you as this or that, but to give you the best liberal arts education we can. [At Princeton] there are no graduate professional schools," Dobin said. "The focus has always been on undergraduate and Ph.D. programs not a proliferation of vocationally oriented degrees."

Both Tilghman and Dobin agree that students make an active decision when they choose to come to the University. "[People come here] for the best undergraduate education out there, you make a choice, you are not going for a vocational degree," said Dobin. Only a very small percentage of the class comes here under the mistaken impression that they will be able to major in vocational fields that the University doesn't offer, said Tilghman.

"Princeton prepares people by preparing their minds," Tilghman said. The school's role is to prepare its students to go out and make a difference in the world; to prepare them both intellectually and morally, she said.

The University's commitment to encouraging intellectual curiosity is deeper than many people realize. According to Tilghman, one of the reasons for the switch from loans to grants in financial aid packages was to relieve the stress placed on students after graduation so that they could choose to do what they wanted absent the pressure to pay down college debts immediately.

"I think our greatest strength as an institution is the coherence of our vision," said Tilghman. None of the school's concentrations are career based, and there are no professional graduate schools, she said.

While Princeton offers a concentration in architecture, as well as an entire school of Engineering and Applied Science, Tilghman stressed that these departments are not necessarily meant to train students to go into particular fields.

"Just as we have english majors who go into medicine, physics and to Wall Street, we have no expectation that all of our engineering grads will go on to [careers in] engineering," she said.

According to their respective websites, neither Harvard nor Yale offers majors in any vocational areas. Both have extensive professional graduate offerings, however their undergraduate majors do not include premed, pre-law, pre-business, communications or journalism. The University of Pennsylvania, on the other hand, offers a business degree through Wharton as well as a communication major, several interdisciplinary majors and several vocationally oriented minors.

While the University does not award degrees in vocational areas, it does offer several courses that are immediately applicable to jobs after college.

First and foremost is the Program in Finance. The largest of the University's certificate programs, the Program in Finance trains its students through a variety of interdisciplinary courses designed to build up all of the tools used by financial analysts, said the program's director Yacine Ait-Sahalia.

For several years now, the council on the Humanities has invited distinguished journalists to come and lecture on their craft. However, since these people don't remain involved with the university for prolonged periods of time, it would be impractical to create a journalism program based solely on that sort of course, Dobin said.

The engineering school offers a course in entrepreneurship, the economics department offers a course in accounting and several departments offer law courses. In this way, Princeton is able to offer many of the sorts of pre-professional classes as other more vocationally oriented schools while keeping them grounded in well established academic disciplines, Tilghman said.

Currently, the University has no plans to add concentrations or certificate programs, either vocationally oriented or otherwise, Dobin said.

The Program in Finance represents the only instance in which the University has synthesized a series of courses that apply to one vocational field into a certificate program. It gave out more than 80 certificates last year and currently comprises more than 120 seniors. The finance certificate offers students the best of both worlds as it offers intellectually rigourous interdisciplinary analysis while having practical applications in the business job market, said Ait-Sahalia.

"This is not just a training program for Wall Street," said Ait-Sahalia, "that is not what it is and it is not what we want it to be." He does point out, however, that this sort of training has obvious benefits in the job market.

It has long been the norm for students to graduate college, work for several years, and then get an MBA if it was needed. It is too soon to tell if earning a certificate in finance will be sufficient to supplant business school later on. The first graduates of the program in finance earned their certificates in 1999, so they will (or will not) be applying to business schools in the coming year or two, said Ait-Sahalia.

Brad Simmons '03 is a politics major who will be going to work for an investment bank after graduation. At that sort of job, employers don't necessarily expect people to come in with extensive specific knowledge of the industry. However, they do expect that you will be able to learn quickly, he said.

For Simmons, the University struck a good balance between offering some courses that could apply directly to a career, while still requiring concentrations in solid and rigorous academic areas. "We're not Wharton, and we shouldn't be," he said.

"It is sort of arbitrary where you draw the line between professional and intellectual," said Barham Ray '03, a senior in the philosophy department and Academic Chair of the USG. Though the University should keep its focus on the liberal arts philosophy, it school needs to make more of an effort to identify those things the students want to learn about, and to offer more interdisciplinary courses, he said.

The bottom line of all of this may still be that Princeton remains extremely competitive in the job market despite the slow economy and being in competition with far more specialized institutions. "If you apply yourself at Princeton there are no limits," said Simmons. "Any student who is willing to work hard will not experience any problems in finding a successful and likeable career shortly after graduating."