When I first started down the path to medicine at the University of Chicago, it was unsurprising to find most of my pre-med peers committing to related majors—neuroscience, biology, chemistry—with a lot of overlapping courses. At the time, that seemed the logical choice for many committed pre-med students, as it gave them the much-needed freedom of selecting other non-major classes that could accommodate the time required for the long list of extracurriculars expected by medical schools. My decision to major in sociology was thus initially grounded in interest rather than practicality.
As I progressed through both the pre-med and sociology tracks, however, the inextricability of my sociological studies from the practice of healthcare became increasingly obvious. Especially when seeing online discourse on politics and current events, wherein distrust of the healthcare system is so common, it seems essential that healthcare providers look to bridge the gap between the science in the clinic and the people beyond it. Therefore, I can’t help but feel as though a more “traditional” pre-med courseload would have left me far less equipped to have the positive impact that I would like to as a healthcare provider.
The price paid for this, though, is a much larger required courseload, where less information can be carried over from one class to the other. And compared to traditional pre-med majors, a smaller selection of STEM courses leads to fewer connections with the professors and students who are often instrumental in securing the internships and research positions that are becoming increasingly necessary for acceptance at most medical schools. With the thresholds for acceptance being so high, most students need to take multiple gap years to build up their application. And many students I’ve spoken with feel that they simply do not have the bandwidth to meet the already demanding pre-med requirements alongside a totally separate major with no overlap.
The increasingly competitive nature of medical school applications which incentivizes this hyperspecialized academic life is not unique to medicine, however. Across numerous other fields, the standards for application to graduate schools, internships, and high paying jobs have raised dramatically in recent years, reducing aspiring students’ opportunities to take diverse courses in topics of interest.
Back in May, the Maroon analyzed what may be a resultant trend. The article, “The Decline of the Liberal Arts at UChicago,” broke down a long-term trend of consistent growth in preprofessional majors like business economics and computer science, while liberal arts majors have seen steady decline, particularly in the humanities and the arts. As part of the investigation, the Maroon interviewed an LLSO and business economics major who had initially wanted to major in human rights but ultimately changed to his current majors with the goal of becoming an investment banker or consultant, as he felt he couldn’t justify an expensive college tuition with a major that would struggle to make enough money to pay itself off.
Crucially, the logic behind his decision revolved around a need to pay off his degree, rather than a desire for a particularly upper-class lifestyle. And as the cost of living continues to outpace the average salary in America, high paying jobs like investment banking or consulting will be in increasingly high demand, making the competition for them even fiercer. This in turn further pushes students away from any degrees that aren’t the appropriate preprofessional degree if they want to be a competitive applicant.
Baked into the University of Chicago is an intellectual tradition wherein students are enabled and encouraged to pursue the niche and esoteric academic interests that a research university like ours specializes in. The slogan, “where fun goes to die,” then, represents the forsaking of many of the typical “fun” activities that students might otherwise be partaking in if they weren’t occupied with exhilarating books found deep in the aisles of the Reg bookstacks. This aspect of UChicago—being able to chase down academic knowledge purely out of one’s own intellectual curiosity and finding joy in doing so—is central to what makes our school what it is. But, if we are leaving that liberal arts foundation by the wayside, students are left with all the academic rigor of UChicago and none of the intellectual stimulation that has historically made it so rewarding.
Instead, students are encouraged by these hypercompetitive environments to forsake their intellectual curiosities, authentic friend groups, and potential hobbies so that they might instead spend time in RSOs, networking events, and classes that serve only to improve one’s chances at landing a “successful” career. If they want to spend any considerable amount of time enriching themselves in those hobbies and interests, they are pushed to commodify them through content creation or entrepreneurship, lest they fall behind their peers who spent that same time building up their CVs.
The cost of this increasingly hypercompetitive environment is not just the diminishing of the liberal arts degree, but rather a consequent perpetuation—and intensification—of these same conditions that produced it. As many of the brightest minds of our generation are forced to choose between intellectual interest and an adequate lifestyle, we slip further and further into a place of ignorance of fields of study fundamental to the functioning of our society: anthropology, philosophy, sociology, writing, art, music, language. The liberal arts directly and indirectly influence the direction in which society moves, whether that be in public policy, cultural movements, social justice, or in my case, medicine.
However much I would like to be able to make a positive impact on people by keeping my head down and focusing on biological or chemical research, the reality of the situation is that—now more than ever—knowledge of liberal arts like sociology is necessary to be able to have the positive impact that I want. Even with all the medical prowess in the world, those skills and knowledge are bottlenecked by the accessibility of and public trust in healthcare institutions. Thus, if my goal is to be a healthcare provider in the most literal sense of the word, it behooves me to understand the social, political, and economic factors which contribute to these issues so that I may work towards remedying them, or at the very least be better equipped to work around them. And to speak more generally, this applies to many more issues than just the inaccessibility of medical care, whether that’s ailing faith in politicians, declining literacy rates, or something else entirely. Issues like these are widespread and impact both our personal and professional lives, and if we hope to address them in our lifetimes, we need to first understand them.
There is no one person or one thing that can be solely blamed for this precipitous state of affairs, but rather a system that has gotten out of hand and is showing few signs of stopping. As Gen Z starts to come into its own, it does so in a volatile political and socioeconomic environment that is ripe for change. Moreover, it does so with an interconnectivity and set of technological tools that no generation has had before. This gives us unprecedented ability for social change as it stands, which we have already seen in the growth of social media as a primary battleground for political movements, but it also gives us incredible potential for the change we can make in the future. It is thus that those of us who are able ought to find ways to reincorporate the liberal arts into our social and intellectual lives, so that we may act with informed intent and wield social and political power responsibly, lest we squander our generation’s opportunity to change things for the better.
