There is no such thing as “hard” or “soft” skills: Reconciling STEM & the Liberal Arts

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has claimed that, in the near future, there will be a greater demand for Liberal Arts’ graduates than for those with degrees in finance, computer programming, and even engineering.

Cuban’s provocative prediction assumes a conventional distinction between “Liberal Arts” and STEM (the acronym for studies in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), between “soft skills” and “hard skills.”

But distinctions between these categories of learning need not impose a rigid partition between them. STEM and the Liberal Arts can, in fact, be complementary and interdependent, especially when it comes to language acquisition.

There is no need to pit the “Liberal Arts” against a subject like engineering.

The Liberal Arts, historically, encompassed seven domains of higher education:

• Grammar
• Logic
• Rhetoric
• Arithmetic
• Geometry
• Music
• Astronomy

The well-educated individual sought to master each of these domains in an integrative program. In other words, the complementarity of STEM and languages was already acknowledged at the dawn of university education.

If we are now rediscovering their complementary nature, it is an ancient recognition which we only misplaced by stereotyping fields of knowledge into unnecessarily restrictive pigeonholes.

The Dangers of Pitting Skills Against Each Other

The dichotomy of “hard skills” versus “soft skills” is not especially helpful.

“Soft” can too easily connote weak, mushy, or feeble, when in reality “soft skills” equip a student to be intellectually nimble, versatile, strategically adaptable, agile.

“Hard” can be misconstrued as obdurate, rigid, unchanging, utterly closed to questioning, and, yes, intensely difficult.

We might usefully begin by offering alternatives to the terms themselves: for instance, “specific, defined, quantifiable skills” such as the ability to convert raw data to statistics and information, whereas soft skills are “supple, interpersonal skills” such as communicative responsiveness, work versatility, and environmental and situational adaptability. The soft skills are key for thriving in the midst of volatile employment prospects, versus only acquiring a technical skill that might become obsolete at any time.

STEM and languages can be complementary. Students who develop a narrow specialization in one STEM area could profoundly benefit from developing skills in a second or third language.

On the most apparent level, doing so would equip them to communicate aspects of their specialist, technical expertise into that target language. It encompasses the ability to translate one’s knowledge to differing audiences, in distinct contexts, and across disciplinary boundaries which in turn increases the possibilities to achieve innovative applications of that knowledge.

For their part, students of languages would benefit from acquiring first-hand awareness of one or more STEM disciplines.

At the very least, they should gain a working knowledge of the scientific method.

I relish the “permission” that learning languages grants us to consider any and every field of human knowledge — and to consider those fields at their most fundamental core like their terminology, lingo, jargon, and their most innovative manifestations, like how to express the latest developments on the furthest frontier of a STEM field.

The Benefits of Learning Languages

Ultimately, language and culture are inseparable. We cannot understand one very well, if at all, in isolation from the other.

The advantage of language learning, in my view, can be summed up in one word: access — access to ideas, to cultures, to the world.

Creating access is fundamentally what we do when teaching languages and literatures. When we teach a language, we create access to other ways of thinking, perceiving, and expressing.

When we translate, we facilitate access to other peoples, cultures, and worldviews. When we guide students through a piece of literature, we render accessible the best that has been imagined across time and place.

When we help heritage speakers improve their first language, we offer access to their families’ deeper past and present.

Acquiring a second or third language is an eminently transferable skill which enhances our students’ career prospects, cultural literacy, and access to greater opportunities worldwide.

When students acquire another language, the world is their laboratory. All their cross-language experiences comprise their experiments. 

Knowledge, A Never Ending Pursuit

To be the most well-rounded graduates possible, and thereby to increase their employability, students would do well to take advantage of the years they have during their undergraduate studies, in whatever field, to allow themselves to read and reflect on the nature of the knowledge they are gaining: How rapidly will this knowledge become dated? How might it apply to what they’ve learned in the past and what they hope to learn next? 

In this vein, I encourage students to stretch themselves by reading at least two books in their field each semester other than the assigned textbooks.

Even while holding down one or more part-time jobs during their studies, which many undergraduates do, they are unlikely ever to have that amount of time or energy available again for highly intentional reading and reflection.

More importantly, the practice of regularly reassessing the inherent limits and latitudes of one’s knowledge cultivates a versatility of mind, akin to what I’ve been discussing here in relation to language acquisition.

Contrary to what the Great Oz tells the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, achieving a diploma does not confer some kind of substitute for brains.

Real fluency, in languages as in any other form of literacy, is an ongoing proficiency one must actively maintain, even and especially after a degree certifies one’s attainment in a particular field of study.

Prepare to adapt. Equip yourself to innovate.