Liberal Arts and Unicorns and Rainbows

I've started reading a very frustrating book called You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a Useless Liberal Arts Education by George Anders. The author's main argument is that the qualities that are developed through a solid liberal arts education -- a sense of inquisitiveness; the ability to consider both sides of an argument; the ability to think, speak and write clearly -- are precisely the kinds of skills that employers increasingly need in the 21st century economy. Rather than accept the conventional wisdom that obtaining a STEM degree is the only justifiable reason to attend college, Anders seems to argue that a liberal education is the true key to success on the job market.

Now, I'm a big fan of liberal arts and still believe in education for education's sake, but I found Anders argument quite frustrating. 

I'm only a couple chapters in, but so far the book consists primarily of anecdotes about folks with an interest in some esoteric subject who graduated with a bachelor's degree and managed to (eventually) get a "real" job in a company or startup. And, indeed, the people that Anders describes seem to be interesting, motivated, smart, and resourceful. Anders implicit claim is that the liberal education was the causal factor. 

Perhaps I was in a contrarian mood when I started the book, but with each anecdote, I became increasingly frustrated with these cherry-picked stories being presented as evidence of the author's thesis. Looking for successful people who have a liberal arts background and then making a causal claim about the relationship between their success and their background strikes me as the type of fallacious reasoning that a good liberal arts education should prevent one from making.

If you imagine post college career outcomes as normally distributed (i.e., most folks are in the middle, but a small number are at the tails, highly successful to the right and completely dismal to the left), I would wager that the distribution for liberal arts majors is shifted to the left compared to STEM majors -- the average physics major will be more successful post college than the average, say, history major. Anders seems to be picking folks from the top of the distribution and claiming that they are typical of the distribution.

I'm hoping that the book will become more persuasive as I get further in, but I'm not holding my breath.