The purpose of higher education is to prepare students for the jobs and careers that follow. We go to a good college in order to launch our future livelihood. That's how it works. Or, at least, that's what our parents told us. This is why in TV commercial after commercial, job training institutions like Phoenix and Everest urge us to trade our couches and remotes for textbooks and shiny new degrees. And not just any degree, but a degree that directly translates into a new career with a stable income: medical assisting, accounting, or business administration. Vocational and for-profit college programs guarantee job-ready students by supplying them skills and training for their specific fields. And that is what a liberal arts education does, too—just in a less linear, less myopic fashion.

A liberal arts education is, after all, about the education; the general intellectual development of its students. Liberal arts schools prepare their students for careers without narrowing their academic—or even professional—possibilities. The University of Michigan does not provide job training; rather, it aims to produce well-rounded graduates, students who succeed in their chosen fields and in the world at large. Such universities boast full-bodied curriculums—Astronomy and English, Music and Geometry, Linguistics and History—and expect that their students take advantage of such an academic culture.

Take the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts: LSA’s purpose is to foster limber minds and flexible intellects through general course requirements that students must meet, regardless of their individual concentrations. To receive a Bachelor of Arts or Science, students complete writing courses, fulfill quantitative reasoning requirements, and earn credits outside of their majors.

Initially, this can be a tough concept to grasp for those of us with the means and motivation to take on a liberal arts education. As naïve yet know-it-all freshmen at orientation, confidently building a first semester of classes per our lofty career and academic goals, some of us balked at the idea of foreign language and social science requirements. With only four or five years to tackle concentration programs, we weren't sure we could allow for electives and non-major courses.

But these diversions often prove worthwhile, occasionally inspiring minors or even double majors, or at the very least generating and satisfying intellectual curiosities. Within the breadth and freedom of a liberal arts education, we can take a chance on unfamiliar subjects and pursue interests we never even knew we had. Even if our Anthropology, Photography, or Biology classes are left out when tabulating needed credits for a degree in Economics or Art History, the lessons we learned and the skills we acquired stay with us. Consequently, the University of Michigan cultivates Renaissance women and men who never stop being students, even after graduating. We continue to learn, to grow, and to ask questions. We are persistent in following our intellectual passions, wherever they might lead us, because that is what our education has encouraged and taught us to do.

But a liberal arts education does more than create surgeons with film blogs and graphic artists with Popular Science subscriptions—it builds an unshakeable foundation in critical thinking. Through exposure to multiple areas of study, we collect different means of analysis and patterns of logic. We gain the skills to translate our thoughts into organized, written language, and provide complex solutions to complex problems. We digest and consider different viewpoints while synthesizing our own, using professional opinions and personal experiences to develop our singular philosophies. These are the ways we learn to think: pragmatically, creatively, and most importantly, for ourselves.

This is possible because a liberal arts education is greater than the sum of its parts. It is not solely the dates we memorized, the equations we studied, or the facts we absorbed. The substance of our education is secondary to the skills we gained, those actual arts of liberal arts: the processes and methods of thinking and learning. Maybe a pre-med student will never strictly find a professional need for her academic minor in Russian Film, but such an unlikely background will likely provide the capacity for innovative avenues of analysis and problem solving.

And as for those self-assured freshmen making their four year plans—they can hardly be sure their initial majors will remain unchanged by their sophomore years, let alone predict the next fifteen years of their post-undergraduate lives. Even those with their futures carefully and confidently mapped are unable to fully guarantee the topography of what is ahead. At the University of Michigan, the range and variety of our educations means we prepare for every eventuality and every success.

While it may be true that a liberal arts education rarely provides a ready-made professional field with a degree, the product of this course of studies is far more beneficial. Instead, University of Michigan graduates have flexible academic experiences, educations and skill sets that can bend and stretch to accommodate any career or academic opportunities to which we aspire.