Passage One If you know exactly what you want, the best route to get a job is to get specialized training. A recent survey shows that companies like graduates in such fields as business and health care who can go to work immediately with very little on-the-job training. That’s exactly true of booming fields that are challenging for workers. At Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, for example, bachelor’s degree graduates get an average of four or five job offers with salaries ranging from the high teens to the low 20s and plenty of chances for rapid advancement. Large companies, especially, like a background of formal education coupled with work experience. But in the long run, too much specialization doesn’t pay off. Business, which has been flooded with MBAs, no longer considers the degree an automatic stamp of approval. The MBA may open doors and command a higher salary initially, but the impact of a degree washes out after five years. As further evidence of the erosion of corporate faith in specialization degrees, Michigan State’s Scheetz cites a pattern in corporate hiring practices. Although companies tend to take on specialists as new hires, they often seek out generalists for middle- and upper-level management. “They want someone who isn’t constrained by nuts and bolts to look at the big picture,” says Scheetz. This sounds suspiciously like a formal statement that you approve of the liberal-arts graduate. Time and again labor-market analysts mention a need for talents that liberal-arts majors are assumed to have: writing and communication skills, organizational skills, open-mindedness and adaptability, and the ability to analyze and solve problems. David Birch claims he does not hire anybody with an MBA or an engineering degree. “I hire only liberal-arts people because they have a less-than-canned way of doing things,” says Birch. Liberal arts means an academically thorough and strict program that includes literature, history, mathematics, economics, science, human behavior—plus a computer course or two. With that under your belt, you can feel free to specialize. “a liberal-arts degree coupled with an MBA or some other technical training is a very good combination in the market place,” says Scheetz.