"An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest."
Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)

Do you want to invest in yourself as a means of improving your personal life and career?   On a personal level, the MLA program gives you the opportunity to invigorate your mind, stimulate your thinking, and reconnect to the intellectual side of life that you have missed since college.  After years of working in a demanding and absorbing job, you may find your MLA experience just the sort of intellectual exercise you crave to get your brain back in shape!

In terms of your career, the MLA is not designed with specific career goals in mind.   You may find, however, that the variety and scope of the program assists you in your professional life and in career changes.

As an MLA student, you will benefit from the intense reading, writing, and critical-thinking skills that are honed as part of each and every one of your classes.  You will gain the ability to write clearly, communicate difficult concepts and ideas, connect with other people, understand different cultures and perspectives, and make difficult decisions.  These are skills that you will develop in all of your MLA classes.  The business world in particular has an increasing demand for creative people with strong writing and critical-thinking skills.  If you want to be one of these people, the MLA program is just right for you!

If you have an intense desire to teach, the MLA degree can open doors in that direction too.  We remind you that the MLA degree is not a pre-professional program, and that if you are interested in teaching you would be better served by a more traditional degree program with emphasis on a single discipline.  That said,  a growing number of MLA graduates have used their MLA degree to teach in two-year colleges.   In fact, many of our MLA graduates will testify that the ability to teach multiple subjects such as history and literature have been a great asset in finding teaching positions in area colleges and universities.   An increasing percentage of our graduates have also gone on to advanced degree programs, including doctorates. 

If you are already a school teacher, the MLA program can complement your existing knowledge and sharpen your thinking and teaching skills.  Recent educational reform studies have stressed the particular need for teachers to increase their knowledge in their respective teaching fields.  Since much undergraduate and in-service work of teachers focuses on pedagogy, the MLA is particularly attractive because it provides you with knowledge in your various teaching subject areas and improves your ability to make connections in your classroom for your students.  Imagine teaching history using literature and film!  In addition, if you teach in Texas you will automatically receive a salary increase when you complete your MLA degree!  

In sum, the MLA program is directed neither toward professional research nor toward the achievement of a doctorate.  It is designed to offer you a choice of challenging and stimulating learning experiences within an interdisciplinary liberal arts framework.  Most of our students seek the MLA degree to fulfill their intellectual curiosity, to continue their education, and for personal fulfillment.  That said, you will find that benefits of the program often have profound consequences for your professional development as well as your intellectual growth.

"The Business of the Humanities"
Excerpt from article by Dr. Michael Dewilde, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 1, 2005, p. B5.

"The liberal arts, and the humanities in particular, seem to be a hidden passion for any number of CEO's, executives, Wall Street investors, and lawyers. I had dinner with a partner at Goldman Sachs who admitted to hiring mostly liberal-arts types. The Goldman Sachs partner confessed that because he has to spend the better part of his days around a conference table with the same group of people, he 'damn well better like them.' Those with liberal-arts degrees, he's found, are much better company than your average business major, and equally, if not more, competent. When I tentatively suggested that literature, art, and moral philosophy might help them [do their job better]... they didn't laugh: They agreed, and lamented their ignorance of those fields. The irony is inescapable. So many students, intent on becoming successful in business, steel themselves against the lessons of the humanities. So many managers, professionals, and business owners (a minority, perhaps, but still a significant number) have begun searching in the humanities for answers to their problems."