The versatility of this degree program makes it a popular one at Bay Path University. Liberal Arts majors are well prepared to enter a variety of professional careers in which good critical thinking, writing, and leadership skills are required. Liberal Arts also provides excellent preparation for moving on to graduate school programs in areas as diverse as art, business, English, history, psychology, and many more. Liberal Arts majors work with their educator coach to plan their own unique academic paths through the college experience. They are encouraged to delve into a variety of disciplines, drawing from their wealth of knowledge and applying it to critical thinking and problem solving.

Student Learning Outcomes

The goal of the Liberal Studies Department is to prepare critical thinkers, articulate communicators, and effective problem solvers, ready to enter a variety of career paths or proceed to graduate level study upon completion of their undergraduate studies. Student learning outcomes, as adopted from AAC&U and the National Forum on Information Literacy, include the following:

• Students will have the ability to engage and learn from perspectives and experiences different from one’s own and to understand how one’s place in the world both informs and limits one’s knowledge. Students will have the capacity to understand the interrelationships between multiple perspectives, such as personal, social, cultural, disciplinary, environmental, local, and global.
• Students will have the ability to integrate learning - across courses, over time, and between campus and community life. Students will be effective integrative learners, able to make simple connections among ideas and experiences, as well as synthesize and transfer learning to new, complex situations within and beyond the campus.
• Students will develop critical thinking skills characterized by their comprehensive exploration of issues, ideas, artifacts, and events before accepting or formulating an opinion or conclusion. Students will recognize that success in all disciplines requires habits of inquiry and analysis that share common attributes.
• Students will become dialectical thinkers, demonstrating solid knowledge of disciplinary parameters and will be able to push beyond those boundaries in new, unique, or atypical recombination by uncovering or critically perceiving new syntheses and using or recognizing creative risk-taking in order to envision a response.
• Students will develop well-rounded thinking skills that give them the ability to know when there is a need for information, as well as to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively and responsibly use and share that information for the problem at hand.