New liberal arts degrees are particularly sold on the generic skills they impart (as we saw in Chapter 3) and, in particular, the idea that through them, one ‘learns to learn’. The idea is that, as opposed to the specific content imparted through disciplinary degrees, what is needed today is the ability to move quickly between projects and apply existing knowledge in new settings: adaptability, flexibility and a capacity for lateral thinking. Liberal arts are, then, thought of as an especially good training for the current job market, and liberal arts graduates are thought of as particularly employable.

It is difficult to amass meaningful evidence to show that liberal arts graduates have strong employment outcomes because so few students take them in any one national system, exacerbating the problems of controlling for institution and class effects, among other factors (Godwin, 2015a). In the English context, liberal arts degrees tend to be grouped under ‘combined honours’ for national statistical purposes. This is a very broad umbrella category that includes most degrees taken at the Open University, the largest higher education provider in the UK by number of students, with a strong remit for widening participation. As such, it is difficult to get a picture of graduate outcomes for the liberal arts at a national level, though the introduction of a ‘liberal arts’ code under the new Higher Education Classification of Subjects should make these easier to track, as well as indicating the term's increasing recognisability. While it is possible to compare outcomes for each individual degree against the average for that institution, the small numbers as well as the lack of demographic data at that level would make such comparisons unhelpful.

Therefore, instead of focusing on whether liberal arts graduates ‘are’ particularly employable, here, I explore narratives of employability as they are told on universities’ promotional webpages, as well as how such stories are complicated by some students and staff – especially those at modern universities, or who are in some ways less privileged than others. They are critical of attempts to present just one sort of educational value (for instance, an industrial one about skills or a market one about visibility on the job market) as the truth of the liberal arts. Nor do they conflate them; rather, they seek to interrogate the appropriateness of this or that value in specific educational settings.