Designed with Development in Mind
Pair professional specialization with a liberal arts foundation in our Master of Liberal Studies Program. We offer master’s degrees in a wide variety of fields, combined with a core program that emphasizes knowledge and skills that will remain valuable no matter what personal and professional challenges may come your way.
Balance work and life as you pursue advanced learning at your own pace, with small class sizes and individual guidance from experts in their fields.
Choose your specialization from our variety of concentrations. Some concentrations are available on-campus, and all are available fully online. In addition to our 10-hour liberal arts core, you will complete 21 graduate hours in your field of choice, enough to qualify you for promotions, new careers, teaching jobs, or admission to a doctoral program in your chosen field. When you graduate from our program, your diploma and transcript will say “Master of Liberal Studies” and will identify your concentration.
Our liberal arts core will equip you with foundational graduate-level knowledge and skills that are personally valuable and that will advance your current career while preparing you for not-yet- imagined careers in the near future; these skills include graduate-level communication, logic and critical thinking, strategies for comparing the ways in which knowledge is pursued across different disciplines and understanding potential conflicts of values, the use of emerging technologies, and cutting-edge research skills.
Online and On Campus Concentrations
We offer a variety of concentrations in the arts, humanities, social sciences, public service, technology, health and human performance, and business. Most of our concentrations allow you the flexibility to design features of your own course of study and to engage in interdisciplinary work. Contact our concentration coordinators for more information about concentrations that interest you.
Core Courses
The heart of our MLS Program is the liberal arts core, which is intrinsically interdisciplinary and adds universally valid, useful, and transferable knowledge and skills to the specializations that our concentrations offer. The wider context and understanding provided by the liberal arts core gives our students advantages over narrowly trained specialists, and it prepares MLS graduates to adapt to and succeed as leaders in a rapidly changing workforce.
Culminating Projects Fair (New!)
All of our concentrations require that students complete a culminating project – a master’s thesis or other project – in their specialization, which they design themselves and pursue in close collaboration with their professors. This project showcases what the student has learned in our program and the student’s skill in applying that knowledge. Students may use this project to represent themselves to promotion boards, prospective employers, or doctoral program admissions committees.
Beginning in 2024, the Master of Liberal Studies Program will hold an online culminating projects fair every Fall and Spring. Graduating students from all concentrations will be invited to create posters or short presentations and to come together in an evening online forum to discuss their projects with one another and the larger MLS community of students and faculty.
Why Choose a Master of Liberal Studies Program?
Graduate-level education involves specialization. However, the traditional model in which graduate education involves only specialization is breaking down in the face of revolutionary technological advances that are changing our social and economic foundations. Employers now report that the most common reason that new employees fail is not a lack of technical knowledge or ability in their fields but a lack of the so-called “soft” skills that our Master of Liberal Studies program emphasizes.
Many of today’s careers won’t exist in five or ten years, or they will change so rapidly that many people won’t be able to keep up. Many of the careers that will be important in five or ten years haven’t been fully imagined yet.
The best way to prepare for success in this rapidly changing world is not new: it is to add advanced liberal arts education – education in transferable skills that include the “big picture” context, an understanding of values, creativity, logic, research skills, and communication. The “liberal” here is not political; it refers to breadth of knowledge. Indeed, the idea that these general skills are important is conservative insofar as they are traditional, indeed ancient features of professional education.
Imagine the professional who will be best equipped to lead other professionals in their field into the future. What will that person have that the others don’t? This leader will have a larger perspective – a larger sense of the context in which their profession relates to other professions. This leader will have greater creativity – a greater ability to imagine possibilities. This leader will have superior logical ability – a greater ability to distinguish good arguments from bad ones. This leader will have a fuller understanding of the kinds of research that are most relevant to the task at hand and a greater skill in distinguishing good sources from bad ones. This leader will be the most effective communicator, knowing what to say and when and how to say it. This leader will be grounded in Liberal Studies.
Frequently Asked Questions
A master’s degree is a large commitment, which, of course, comes with many large questions. Find answers to your inquiries that prospective students frequently ask before applying for the Master of Liberal Studies at Fort Hays State.
