If Thomas Friedman is right, if the future belongs to those who can invent new jobs and industries rather than staffing existing ones, then it belongs to people with a broad liberal arts education. In today’s world of economic fluidity and instability, where the old career ladders are falling down, where even the traditional notion of what constitutes a job is up for grabs the necessary aptitudes, writes Richard A. Greenwald, author of The Microentrepreneurial Age, include “breadth, cultural knowledge, and sensitivity, flexibility,” and “the ability to continually learn, grow, and reinvent.”

By: Keoni Cabral

Tony Wagner, author of The Global Achievement Gap, notes that even high-tech companies “place comparatively little value on content knowledge.” David M. Rubenstein, the billionaire cofounder and co-CEO of The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, put it this way earlier this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: “H = MC. Humanities equals more cash.” Information is freely available everywhere now; the question is whether you know what to do with it.