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Why Liberal Arts Education is Important? Liberal Arts Colleges in India | Career, Scope & More

2,581 views Wait, is this logic right? • Jul 06, 2023
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What is liberal arts education? Do you know someone who is confused about whether to take arts commerce, science, maths or engineering for higher studies after 12th standard? Have you heard the term liberal arts thrown around such students lately? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, you need to watch this video.

Navin and Shrikant are breaking down the details of liberal arts education in India in a simple, fun and accessible way in this video. Understand what are liberal arts colleges. Why do you need liberal arts education? Are liberal arts colleges worthless? And more information about liberal arts colleges, fees, scope and careers with liberal arts education in India?

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS
Watch other episodes of The FutureIQ podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAppTB0r5_TaYueZ0adD42Wiw5X-wTE4v

More videos just for you:
Should you go abroad for higher studies: https://youtu.be/rL74DXfvYJY
How to select an engineering college: https://youtu.be/kUgFekrvHrg

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:10 Liberal arts colleges
02:52 Narrow vs broad focus
05:11 Steve jobs
05:58 IITs & NEP
07:33 The old system
08:20 OODA loop
10:15 Liberal arts
12:13 Colleges in India
13:24 Going abroad vs taking a liberal arts course
15:08 Subject vs teacher
16:32 Scope
19:10 Who is it for?
21:30 Jobs

#futureIQ #liberalarts

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Transcript

and then comes my second question which I believe is the question that is on everybody's mind since this video began okay okay uh we've been as you might be aware we've been doing a small series of episodes targeting 12 standard students or their parents even if you don't fit that profile maybe you can forward it to somebody you know and please do uh please do uh after a couple of such episodes we will get back to our regular programming but we do recommend that you watch this also it will increase your knowledge because very soon people will come to you for this advice that's why this is future IQ we are worrying about your future IQ yeah in general uh if you
follow future IQ you are going to become soon the go-to person for all Gyan in your circles so might as well and it's okay if you don't give us credit if it's okay if you don't say you learn this from Naveen we are very fine with it as long as the sum total of knowledge in the universe increases we are completely fine with it that's that's the intent of this channel yes such for the Relentless pursuit of knowledge did you know that if you are unsure of what to study after 12th there are colleges in India which allow you to try out various subjects for a year and only at the end of the first year do you have to declare what
you want your degree in I thought that happened only in Gully Cricket trial ball first and then actual overstart right so in fact Indian education system has had this serious problem that at the age of 17 just after 12th standard you have no clue about what different subjects actually involve yeah and you have to make the decision and it's like a permanent issue yeah I always thought that is very unfair on students like at age 17 you barely know what what you want to eat for breakfast right deciding the rest of your life absolutely that is true and in the west there has always been this concept of you know you declare your major only after a year or
two of studying and the same concept is now being brought to India by a few colleges oh okay they are called liberal arts colleges so the basic idea is that you know imagine that you are a student who's quite unsure of whether she wants to do engineering or psychology or economics or journalism I mean I regularly we run into students like this and either the students are unhappy with the choices that they have to make or they just don't know how to decide yeah 10 years ago I used to send them to Career counselors and I'm not very happy with that yeah a choice but now I usually recommend to them that they should just go join a liberal arts
college right what a liberal arts college does is that it allows you I mean it's the same college has all subjects in there right they have faculty for Science Biology computer science Etc they have faculty for economics Finance they have faculty for arts history hold on so what degree does a student get when coming out of the college so that depends on what a major you uh choose right oh so when you're joining that's what you meant when you said declaring for a major exactly when you join the college huh you do not I mean you are not joining for any specific degree okay at the end of one year or one and a half year depending on
the college you might say well you know what I think I want a degree in biology in which case you will end up with a BSC biology okay I want a degree in computer science you will get a BSC computer science right but if you say I want a degree in Indian history then you will have a ba history right but uh so you spend the first one one and a half year learning almost everything yes and in fact that is another problem I have with the Indian education system right if you choose engineering you don't learn any biology you don't learn any economics you don't learn any history and you are such a narrow Focus
narrow Focus that in the beginning of your career it really helps you because you know you're very focused and you get exactly that kind of a job but for the long term career it is pretty bad right this kind of a narrow Focus I thought having a narrow Focus actually helped you progress quicker and straighter in your career see that's like you know progressing quicker and straighter initially but then it has its own it plateaus out right if you look in the west somebody did an analysis of uh the top CEOs of some of the biggest companies in the world and they found that one of the most common backgrounds was liberal arts because these people
have a background in so many different subjects and when you act the top of your game if you want to some seriously achieve something in any field you need to have exposure to all different subjects right you can't be just a oh I am only an engineer I will only study engineering right that doesn't quite work and there is precedent uh in in a very famous person Steve Jobs who uh reportedly took a calligraphy course when he was in college and that came back to help him while designing that I love this example right because uh Steve Jobs uh has himself said that the reason Apple Computers has such lovely designs and such an attention to detail is because
of that calligraphy course he did uh during his undergraduate and that would not have happened if he was an IIT okay this is the first time I've heard I didn't say anything that is not in favor of iits and that's I'm trying not to you know start a flame Warrior but actually I mean even the iits are improving slowly they are introducing other subjects like bunch of iits have economics bunch of iits have biology and I mean they've always had Humanities departments with one or two electives uh that you took during the course but okay that is increasing okay so we are moving in the right direction the National Education Program any policy has also encouraged uh this they are in
favor of doing minors do you know what a minor is absolutely not I never unless you're speaking about younger children under the age of 14 those are minors or you're speaking about people who dig under the Earth those are also miners but different spelling stay away from both of those but basically when you decide that oh I am going to do uh my degree in computer science right you can additionally say that I want to minor inside ecology right okay so that means that you have to do so many courses in computer science and then so many courses a fewer number of courses in Psychology and now you are a person who has understanding of both
understanding of both areas right and that makes for a very interesting background and interesting career possibilities right yeah so uh again the iits have started doing minors uh but if you want to do this properly a liberal arts college has that like a is inbuilt into the system yeah and this inbuilt system when when you think about it sounds very much like a try before you buy kind of a thing absolutely so uh you know in our old system or the default system like by the 12th standard you pretty much have decided what you're going to do you are either going to do engineering or you are going to do uh medical or you're going to become a CA or something like
that that's already decided before you have even done any courses that are related to that right because the physics you do in 12th standard has nothing to do with what you are studying in computer science for example right so but you decide and that decision is based on God knows I mean like major analysis because it's like a big important decision for people uh and one of the things we always say on this program is that big analysis is not the right way to take decisions right the better way to take decisions is action uh you know get into a few cycles of the UDA Loop uh something we talk about in another episode you should check that
out for those who haven't watched that episode yet what is the UDA Loop inside loop is basically uh it comes from American Military Doctrine and what it says is that I mean decisions are based on observe right you collect data from actual experiments on the ground uh then Orient yourself let me try to figure out what the overall situation is then you decide then you act and then this action produces more data so the whole thing repeats and one of the most important things there is that the more cycles of the UDA Loop you do the better is going to be both your decision making and your progress whereas in our current education system you get to decide just once
you're 12 standard okay and then the next decision is four years later right and by that case most people are too afraid of changing anything uh which is we'll talk about this in another episode maybe yeah we'll see yeah we'll try that but I I without realizing it I went through the Buddha Loop myself when I did physics uh bachelor's first and then went into stuff and then into radio and stuff happened but anyway that's another story for us updates no no this is an important point right the wooden Loop says that you need to do quick experiments right yeah whereas your experiment was like entire three year degree is like one Loop of the wooden
Loop right but there had to be some degree right there had to be something bad then liberal arts wasn't an option but today there is there is yes there should have been so how do you implement the UDA Loop in a liberal arts uh context that's context I mean the first semester you take six courses in six different subjects the second sub semester you take a new set of six subjects and six different uh areas okay all of these not all of this but some of them are like the college wants you to take them because it's basic for anything you do in life like critical thinking and so on but some of these are based on your
interests if you had a list of six interests you could actually take three of those courses in the first semester and three in the second semester and now out of those six you have first hand information ex actual experience of whether you liked it or not right this reminds me of a person I know who was very interested in chemistry right and uh I mean she didn't do liberal arts uh she did actually an even better thing took a gap year oh okay and what she did was she happier is better he says absolutely you have to hold him to it yes yes um but she went to I sir Mohali and spent a couple of months there uh you
know helping out in the chemistry lab there and she realized oh this is chemistry I don't want to do chemistry right what a lovely thing to realize before you join college right yes not four years I have friends who did four years of Metallurgy so that they could go on and become a Bollywood uh screenwriter uh head of an ad agency and so on right I mean they deserve to have a liberal arts college they absolutely do yes and so do I I wish I had him in liberal arts college but then again I never regretted the degree that I did I never regretted the course uh the education that I pursued I can give you a list
I completely agree yes before we continue though uh are there any liberal arts colleges already operational thriving in India yeah yeah yeah so uh I mean they're relatively new most liberal arts colleges are like 10 years old um although the oldest really is symbiosis School of liberal arts in Pune that's about 20 years old but the top ones these days are there is Ashoka University in Delhi well not Delhi it is in sonipat which is about an hour out of Delhi there is flame in Pune there is kriya in Sri City near Chennai uh these are the most popular ones after that there's a whole bunch of new ones because pretty much everyone has realized not everyone a lot of people
have realized that this is a good thing so more and more liberal arts colleges are starting and even existing colleges are making uh I mean liberal arts courses or liberal arts uh kind of stuff so for example Pune university has a liberal arts course now um this is the way not the Mandalorian but liberal arts yes uh so we also spoke about uh the opportunity of going abroad and how if it arises we should take it how do you how do you compare these two options uh going abroad versus taking a liberal arts course the two advantages of doing liberal arts in India is that it is significantly cheaper uh to do a liberal arts course
in India than to go abroad of course second is that liberal arts courses in India are much newer right and they're reasonable level funded so they have a much more modern and wider set of offerings the subjects they give so for example if you do liberal arts and Kings College London you will get liberal arts from like two centuries ago right you'll learn Theology and Latin and history and there is no economics no psychology so yeah that can be problematic but in general if you go to top universities in UK US Europe Etc the quality of teaching will be a little higher and there's a whole bunch of reasons why going abroad has other benefits other
than just but we have already discussed in that entire episode so yeah we'll put a link in the show notes do check that episode out it's fabulously well explained if money is not a concern I would say go abroad uh but if money is just medium concern then do liberal arts here if money is like a major concern you can't do liberal arts in India because right now liberal arts is quite expensive yeah so probably in another few years maybe a lot of colleges will start offering liberal arts courses and the entire Market will sort of come into an equilibrium category so two questions come to mind uh one thing about liberal arts courses the first being uh it looks
to me like the first two semesters yeah we'll need really good teachers and all of those different subjects that we are talking about yeah uh otherwise there is a possibility that ah if I don't get a teacher for a good teacher for a subject that I like that I might not develop enough interest of course I think that is true regardless of regardless anywhere that when you say that a subject is boring what you usually mean is that I was taught this subject by a boring teacher right all subjects are interesting if taught by the right person okay but one good thing about the top liberal arts colleges in India is that because they are so new and because
they have a very modern Outlook they hire a really good faculty right they hire top faculty from all over the world convince them to come to India so they're obviously even paying them good money really well uh like way out of uh comparison from you know more standard colleges in India so as a result the I'm not saying that each and every uh faculty member there is excellent but the chances of getting a really good faculty member are fairly high and then comes my second question which I believe is the question that is on everybody's mind since this video began scope yeah um compared to say an iitn right the job market is of course nowhere uh close to
as good uh for two reasons iits are like really cream and they're in stem where there are lots of jobs while paying jobs right uh whereas liberal arts is a much more fuzzy knowledge base right so initially uh there are jobs but not as great uh there is usually a few years of struggle for two three reasons one is that because the student got to study so many different things uh the student has multiple interests correct and they're trying maybe I'll try this for a while so they do something similar in the job market also second is that because liberal arts colleges are so new in India industry hasn't yet completely caught on to it right so the campus
placements are there but not as strong as in well-established standard colleges but what I did was a few years ago I asked students of liberal arts colleges to share who have done it a few years ago and have been in the job market for a while to share what they are doing and I think consistently the feedback I got was that after a couple of years of a bit of a struggle uh they landed really interesting jobs I mean of course a bunch of them went abroad to top colleges like Harvard and Exeter and so on and did further degrees but after that they ended up with very interesting jobs in a wide variety of fields I mean
you know from something as traditional as data analyst to you know working on policy international relations think tanks uh or you know just ngos so lots of very interesting careers and they were all happy with that after the initial period fascinating a lot of this description reminds me of my own College days although I didn't I don't have a liberal arts degree but the progression is similar I went from physics to content writing to technical writing to radio to if it is slow do it yourself liberal arts yes she actually did yeah one final question I guess I can think of is uh can anybody do a liberal arts like I said right now in India it is
primarily for Rich Kids okay the fees are fairly High uh like from five to ten twelve lakhs per year uh which is high by Indian standards uh of course uh all these colleges do have uh 36 5 10 12 lakhs per year yes ouch yeah so um which is about 2-3x of Engineering in private colleges so yeah so it's high uh they do have scholarships uh but still the problem is that because of that initial period of struggle for the job uh if you are not well off financially this might not be a good uh choice for you you would be stressed out at the very least I think industry also needs to come in and start uh sponsorships of
some kind or because the way you've described liberal arts so far it seems to be like there is great potential in unearthing some really good talent yes especially among kids who are not yet sure of what they want to do in life which is which is almost I would say 90 of the kids and this is not a number that we've uh this is the number I've pulled out I should I should point out when you say is this for everyone I mean if a student is very clear on what they want to do like I want to uh do Aeronautics right they should just go and do Aeronautics right but then this is literal Arts isn't for people who are
unsure yeah but then you gave the example of the woman who was sure she wanted to do chemistry then spend some time in either that's true yeah um yeah but there is a category of people who have actually studied that subject they have taken course courses in that area and they know of course right of course for them there is no point in like you know trying various things well it makes sense make sense make sense I do agree I do understand uh fascinating uh new thing that has come up and if by the time you're watching this episode uh liberal arts is already a huge thing in India and lots of students are opting for Liberal Arts uh
along the same level as your science your Commerce your engineering your Arts your whatever please let us know in the comments so by the way I must uh during the episode I have given the impression that you're not going to get jobs after liberal arts that's not actually true uh because just recently live mid did a survey of liberal arts college just and by recently we mean this is 2023 yeah so uh a link is there you can take a look but basically what they found was that average salaries are lower than the top iits but higher than the average engineering College okay so they're not doing too badly as far as campus jobs are concerned
fascinating little tidbit to uh leave you with because we are now leaving you uh yeah this is actually a lot of links we have collected together information uh poke around take a look um show note and if you have any questions ask us we will get you answers from people who actually know that yeah we should actually get people like who've done liberal arts and have conversations with them and definitely do that ask your questions and we will get them answered yes a m no AUA ask us almost anything EU double A or something like that srikant Naveen this is future IQ thank you thank you for watching till the end if you like this episode check out these
others you might like them also and please share with your friends I'm sure they will also like these thank you