Many students and parents discount the Arts as a pointless activity with no educational value. This is far from the truth. Classes like band, theater, and dance teach students countless skills that attribute to day to day adult life, for example; teamwork, creativity, and responsibility. Many colleges and employers prefer applicants with an arts background because of their fluency with these attributes.

Americans for the Arts surveyed public school superintendents and American business executives asking their stance on creativity.

“Innovation is crucial to competition, and creativity is integral to innovation,” reads the report, which aims to ask and answer the question of how aligned are schools and business leaders in achieving “creative readiness” in the U.S. workforce.

It is no coincidence that teens who participate in Arts programs tend to be more outspoken and imaginative; performing brings out and enhances these qualities. Core classes do embrace ingenuity periodically, but courses like dance and theater have creativity as the foundation of nearly every assignment. Putting someone on a stage with the sole purpose of entertaining rows of patrons teaches someone confidence in their own skin, confidence to share their ideas with their peers. Businesses appreciate this because it creates a productive environment with constant a flow of new ideas. If employees are wary of sharing their opinions on how to do something, a company cannot grow and expand.

Theater, dance, and chorus in particular all teach teenagers to rely on teamwork to get a job done. Instructors show their students that, like a machine, many different elements need to work in union to be able to complete a project. For production-based classes in particular, numerous elements need to come together for the final product to even remotely resemble a semi-professional show. Almost every job today requires you to work with others to finish an assignment. Employers strive to find this specific quality in potential new-hires. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), a non-profit organization that links college career placement offices with employers, conducted a survey where they asked 200 companies to rank the top ten qualities they look for when hiring—“ability to work in a team” was consistently number one.

The Arts also teach responsibility and time management, which landed as number three in the NACE survey results. When participating in the arts, you have to finish your contribution in a timely manner or it may harm the final product. If a percussionist doesn’t learn the sheet music, or if a singer doesn’t practice being on pitch, it can throw off the show. Even crew has to be very time conscious; when set pieces or costumes aren’t completed it ruins the illusion in a production.

Arts programs aren’t the only activities to teach these qualities, but they do present them in a much more concentrated manner. The majority of the class period is spent exercising skills like creativity and teamwork, while more academic orientated courses only enforce the traits sporadically. While high school students may focus on cramming in as many AP and Honors courses as possible, they shouldn’t overlook the opportunity to participate in an arts class that could teach them paramount life skills.