Even if your political science or history degree fails to come through when you try to make the case that you should get minimum wage to become best friends with that think tank’s file cabinet, you can at least go home feeling like a jobless intellectual. After all, if nothing else, a liberal arts degree in a humanities or social science field gives students plenty of opportunities to explore classes outside of their specializations (this is especially comforting when that specialization turns out to be useless).

This being the case, it doesn’t make sense to introduce an even broader degree to the good-luck-finding-a-job-after-four-years-even-if-you’re-well-rounded range of Letters and Science curricula. However, though no conclusive decisions have been made regarding its implementation, UW’s Curriculum Council is discussing the possibility of creating a liberal studies major within L&S.

The major would be more general than a traditional humanities or social science degree, and it would require students to take a wide array of classes rather than focus their studies in one field. The justification for such a department, according to L&S Dean Gary Sandefur, would be its benefit to pre-professional students.

Although we theoretically support any major that allows students to maintain their indecisiveness for four years, it seems a waste of money and resources to create an entirely new department to do something that many Letters and Science fields already accomplish. There’s plenty of time to get a degree in legal studies or sociology, branch out to courses in other departments and still graduate in four years.

And let’s be honest, whether you land that administrative assistant (read: copy machine and coffee slave) position right out of college, and unless your dad’s hooking you up with a job at Deloitte or your Nana is Gloria Vanderbilt, you will probably end up applying to grad school sooner or later, which means your degree is already fulfilling its “pre-professional” function.

Further, in a time when we’re already facing plenty of budget cuts, it doesn’t make sense to invest in unnecessary faculty and advising. And half-assing all the student services needed for a new department would obviously be detrimental to both students and graduation rates.

While broadening the range of classes available to students would presumably make it easier to graduate on time, insufficient advising combined with a less-focused curriculum risks decreasing efficiency. For instance, University of Minnesota’s General College, which consisted of a similar general curriculum as the proposed liberal studies program, was dropped in 2005, in part due to low graduation rates.

With that, UW should think twice before introducing something that may end up simply being an arbitrary expansion of what’s already offered. And, in the era of the quarter-life crisis, it might be better for our futures and our psyches to be able to name exactly what subject that diploma was in.