Can a Movement Towards Skills-Based Hiring Save the Liberal Arts? By Katie Jolicoeur, Ph.D

At Minnesota State University, Mankato, over the past five years, graduates from the College of Humanities and Social Science, who we will combine and define as liberal arts students, have successfully landed in full-time employment in a wide array of industries that are popular in the state of Minnesota such as healthcare, technology, finance, agriculture/food production, and retail (Minnesota State University, Mankato, 2025; State of Minnesota, 2025). While the employment rates for our liberal arts graduates are encouraging, there is an ongoing struggle for students to understand their options and for employers who routinely overlook liberal arts students in favor of business students when posting jobs.

In January of this year, Sean McGowan (2025) of Carnegie Mellon University published an article arguing that employers are facing increasing competition for talent but are still relying heavily on degree titles and majors to sort through applicants. He posited that a better way for employers to address their talent shortage was to look beyond majors and adopt skills-based hiring at a faster rate. McGowan is correct in his assertions that industry needs to move faster in adopting a new mode of reviewing applicants for qualifications. However, higher education needs to also move quickly to find ways to assist students in learning how to communicate their skills to employers.

This article will explore ways in which programs in the liberal arts can begin purposefully integrating career development into their curriculum to assist students in communicating the skill development stemming from their academics and co-curricular activities that employers are seeking. Doing so will open doors for students in the humanities and social sciences, thereby demonstrating the value of a degree in the liberal arts during a time in which they are seeing cutbacks. Additionally, this article will explore ways in which career services professionals can act as advocates for the students in liberal arts though their employer and industry relations work. By integrating both pieces of the puzzle, movement toward skills-based hiring can be a positive change for the liberal arts.

As of the end of May, 2025, a cursory glance at data in Handshake, our online system for job postings, shows that our students have access to over 85,000 job postings. Job filters within Handshake can, of course, be leveraged by students as is the case on most job boards, but if the student’s applicant profile indicates that they are from a non-preferred degree program, the system that the employer is using to screen may not make the connection between the student’s degree program and the jobs that are available. To further compound matters, students in the liberal arts see the careers they pursue as not related to their degree when in reality, their degrees are highly related and applicable to the areas in which they are landing. This is where we, as professionals, can step in. We can help make connections clearer for students as well as for employers.

The Great Liberal Arts Divide

The liberal arts being “under attack” is nothing new. Change magazine published an article in 1971 titled, “The Impending Crisis of the Liberal Arts Colleges.” As a liberal arts major myself, I lament the news about universities closing or merging programs, knowing firsthand the way that my degree set me up for success. At the same time, the reality is that with budgets becoming tighter and enrollment decreasing, universities need to strategize by reducing the number of programs based on low enrollments or duplicative efforts to streamline their offerings and maximize dollars. Condensing students seeking a degree in liberal arts into a smaller number of programs may assist in saving money by reducing overhead. At the same time, it is also necessary that faculty and staff collaborate with leadership and career services professionals to determine the best ways for their programs to teach students how to market the skills they are developing to employers. If you ask any faculty who teach classes in the liberal arts, they will tell you that their curriculum teaches students the skills necessary to obtain employment in a wide array of industries. But do students walk away from those classes thoroughly understanding what skills they have obtained and how they connect to careers?

When comparing the skills most sought after by employers to the skills that liberal arts degrees develop through their curriculum, it is clear that there are multiple correlations. Each year, NACE releases a report based on their research of trends in employment and in January 2025, the top three (3) attributes sought out by employers were problem-solving, ability to work in a team, and communication skills (written) (Gray & Koncz, 2025)

Compare that to data published by the Liberal Arts Foundation in 2025 which states that the top skills that students obtain through a liberal arts degree are critical thinking/problem-solving, communication skills, and emotional intelligence. So, it appears that faculty understand the applicability of the curriculum they are teaching to industries outside of education and research, and research has demonstrated that the skills they are teaching apply directly to the skills sought most by employers. There are clearly multiple divides happening. First, between faculty and students, and second, between students and employers. So, how do we address those divides?

Approaches to Bridging the Divide

As McGowan (2025) stated in January, the only way to accelerate and support a skills-based approach to hiring is to balance the needs as professionals. There are two audiences to assist in our efforts as employer relations professionals in higher education. Below, both audiences are addressed in terms of ideas for how to best approach and build a strategy to make the connections early in an effort to ensure that liberal arts students are not left behind but instead are ahead with the movement towards skills-based hiring.

Employers

Since starting my position, I have been conducting outreach and fielding requests coming in from both new and returning employers who are seeking new ways to engage students. They are all outlining common issues – they want to get in front of students because while they have their jobs and internships posted in Handshake, they are facing issues getting students to apply. Second, many of them are only considering certain types of

students. Here is where the disconnect lies. Many employers I have strategized with routinely focus their efforts on recruiting business students. However, a majority of our student body is enrolled in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. While there is nothing wrong with recruiting out of the business college, they are missing a huge segment of the population. Certainly, there are positions that require specific courses and that cannot be avoided, but that is not the majority of positions. Sound familiar?

When meeting with an employer, ask them what skills a successful candidate needs and what does a successful candidate do on a day-to-day basis? When you do that, listen carefully and read between the lines. They may list things like, “they need to understand people” or “they need to know marketing.” Delve further. What does that mean? Are they actually saying that a candidate needs the ability to read people? To understand how to conduct research? If you start digging deeper, you will find that much of what they are

looking for will connect to your liberal arts students. As with any active listening situation, repeat back what you think you heard, like, “It sounds like what you need is someone who is really good at researching on their own and coming up with a strategy, is that correct?”

Once you do that, connect the dots for them. Recently, I spoke with a company that manufactures and builds equipment used in the airline industry. They needed engineers, sure. But they also needed “management students.” After asking questions, I was able to connect them with a lesser-known major at our university housed in the liberal arts and followed up with an email to them giving them the link to the program for them to

share with their team. They are excited about engaging those students on campus this fall, which is a win for both employers and students. Ultimately, that is a win for their program and the university as a whole.

Students

Students enroll in liberal arts degrees for a variety of reasons. But the one thing all the students seem to have in common is that they struggle to understand their skill set and connect it to industry in a way that makes sense to employers. As career services professionals, this is where we come in.

Similar to the strategy you leverage with employers, start by asking questions. As an experienced career coach, I have my “go-to” questions that I leverage in my sessions with students. I ask questions to learn their story. Where are they from? What were they involved in while in high school? What brings them to college? How did they choose their major? All the questions I ask (and you will want to build your favorite questions) have the goal of learning more about their core skills and experiences. What are they starting with, and what

are they building on as a student at my university? Ultimately, that will help you figure out what they have to market to employers, and you can assist them in building a strategy around that.

Next, help students break down their majors, similar to helping employers break down their employment needs. If a student removes their major from the equation, what skills do they feel that they are developing in their college experience? Help them create their story and experiences in their own words, then help them translate that into the words and phrases that employers use. That all sounds great, but in practice, career services has been pared down, in many cases, to a small staff of just a few people serving the entire campus, alumni body, and employers. How can a small office tackle such a gargantuan task?

Outside of one-on-one sessions with students, there are numerous activities and assignments that can be leveraged in large groups, classrooms, and online to scale career services. Additionally, campuses across the country have been seeing positive impacts by implementing a Career Champions program. By creating what are essentially “brand ambassadors” for career development across campus, career services can expand their

reach. Pairing Career Champions with training faculty to develop career-focused curriculum, particularly in the liberal arts, can be a low-cost way to ensure that students are ready to market their skills effectively to employers. Another low-to-no-cost example is Employer-in-Residence programs that bring employers to campus and assist them in engaging students in multiple colleges over the course of a single day. Creating opportunities in addition to career fairs where employers and students can connect on a personal level will give

them the opportunity to have real conversations about what skills are needed and how those students can fill the gaps.

Finally, liberal arts programs need to start working towards the integration of activities into their curriculum for students to make connections to their careers. Doing so will build visibility over time for outsiders to see the value in the liberal arts. That visibility will end up building buy-in into the liberal arts as viable roads to careers and may just end up slowing and reversing the downward trend in enrollment for the liberal arts around the country.

A Call to Action

Can a movement towards skills-based hiring save the liberal arts? Time will tell. One thing we do know is that we cannot stand back and expect it to happen without our assistance. As employer relations professionals, we all know we are not the only people or university talking to our employers, and this is where we can help each other. Some of us have larger teams than others, but if we all are having the same conversations with employers, converting them one by one into true believers in the gospel of the employability of liberal arts students, we can shift the focus and maybe save each other in the process.

About the Author 

Katie Jolicoeur serves as the Director of Career Services at Minnesota State University, Mankato, the largest public university in the Minnesota State System. Her strategic leadership has rapidly taken MSU from having no employer relations team to launching multiple initiatives not only across campus but across the region, driving economic development and recruitment. A Minnesota native who has lived and worked in career

services previously at Indiana University, Bloomington and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, she has been leveraging her experience and abilities to develop partnerships and innovative programming. Katie holds a BA in History from St. Cloud State University, an MA in Medieval Studies from Western Michigan University, and a Ph. D. in Human Sciences (Leadership Studies) from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

References:

Geiger, L. G. (1971). The Impending Crisis of the Liberal Arts Colleges. AAUP Bulletin, 57(4), 500–504. https://doi.org/10.2307/40224420

Gray, K. & Koncz, A. (2025, January 28). The attributes employers look for on new grad resumes – and how to showcase them. National Association of Colleges and Employers.

https://www.naceweb.org/about-us/press/the-attributes-employers-look-for-on-new-grad-resumes-and-how-to-showcase-them

LiberalArtsEDU.org. (2023, March 22). The key skills you can develop through a liberal arts degree for success in any industry.

https://liberalartsedu.org/blog/the-key-skills-you-can-develop-through-a-liberal-arts-degree-for-success-in-any-industry/

McGowan, S. (2025, January 8). Unlocking talent: The career professional’s role in influencing skills-based hiring. American Association for Employer Relations.

https://www.aaer-web.com/post/unlocking-talent-the-career-professional-s-role-in-influencing-skills-based-hiring-by-sean-mcgowan

Minnesota State University, Mankato. (2025). Career data.

https://mankato.mnsu.edu/university-life/career-development-center/faculty-and-staff/career-data/

State of Minnesota. (2025). Employment statistics by industry. Employment and Economic Development.

https://mn.gov/deed/business/locating-minnesota/data/employment-stats.jsp