Within a week of my arrival at Wesleyan, I had been awarded a new nickname by my dorm mates. “Try-anything-once-Emily,” my friend Andrew christened me after it became clear that, from mystery food items to obscure extreme sports, “no” was not a word often used in my vocabulary. My desire to experiment makes Wesleyan the perfect school for me, both inside and outside the classroom. With its liberal arts curriculum and lack of core requirements, Wes allows students to take risks and try studying almost every topic imaginable at least once.

However, not all college students are so lucky. In the face of widespread budget shortfalls at public universities, many of my friends don’t have the opportunity to try a new subject. Budget cuts have led many public universities to take a more “practical” approach to education. They encourage students to get in and get out with a degree in the shortest amount of time possible, while taking few courses not directly relevant to their major. This approach robs students of intellectual exploration and of the act of learning simply to broaden their horizons. Despite financial issues, there should be more opportunities for liberal arts study in public universities.

In my home state of California, the word “crisis” aptly describes the state of public higher education. This year alone, the state cut funding to the University of California system by $650 million, causing tuition to increase by 17.6 percent this fall. Across the nation, states from Nevada to Pennsylvania are facing similar challenges. With budget shortfalls often come service cuts. Schools offer fewer courses and are often forced to cut entire programs. In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Wendy Brown, a political science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, notes that instead of “educating whole persons,” public universities are on a path to becoming “essentially vocational in nature, oriented entirely around the market logic of job preparation.” Although this is a practical approach, college should not be a degree factory in which a certain number of pages read and requirements fulfilled combine to create a ready-to-employ professional. There is value in the skills and knowledge gained from a liberal arts education.

A liberal arts education imparts not only information, but also skills that can be applied to many situations. Studying diverse academic areas allows students to make interdisciplinary connections between seemingly disparate subjects. When students eventually enter the competitive work force, a wide base of knowledge and the ability to analyze and reason will make them more flexible, desirable, and capable. In the short term, the opportunity to try new courses at a liberal arts college is simply fun. Not every new thing students try will end up being their life calling, but even if they don’t take away a life-affirming lesson or widely applicable skill from their experimental music course or Harry Potter FYI, there are still benefits to widening their horizons.

In a time of economic trouble when some public universities are struggling just to stay open, it may seem frivolous to promote a student’s right to academic experimentation. But I believe that even students who do not have access to a private liberal arts institution should have the right to try anything once. Whether I want to permanently adopt things into my life or to never speak of them again, I’m never positive until that first blind attempt.