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What is a liberal arts college?
Gretchen Murphy, UT Austin
Technically, a liberal arts college is college that specializes in the liberal arts – humanities, social sciences, and sciences – as part of a broad undergraduate education. In other words, these colleges do not specialize in professional, vocational, or technical curriculum (engineering, business, nursing etc.), and usually do not offer MA or PhD degrees. One typical exception to this is education – most liberal arts colleges will offer courses to certify K-12 teachers.
While the Research I University and the liberal arts college can be easy to differentiate from one another, there are many other kinds of colleges and universities that also emphasize teaching but do not fall in either category. For example, the urban commuter campus or open admissions college (University of Houston-Downtown), the land grant state college (Minnesota State College), the small university (St. Edwards University) – none of these is strictly speaking a liberal arts college, but some of the same advice about tailoring your application to the type of institution and taking teaching seriously may apply. Furthermore, most colleges and universities offer within them some kind of liberal arts majors or core curriculum (for example, here at UT-Austin, English is housed in the “College of Liberal Arts”), but they will not necessarily have the distinctive character and emphasis that a “liberal arts college” does.
Some other distinctive characteristics of liberal arts colleges:
• They tend to be small, often around 2,000 students, with low student:faculty ratios.
• They tend to emphasize a traditional, four-year residential college experience, with an important educational component that occurs on the college campus outside of the classroom. Because of this, many liberal arts colleges are set off from major urban areas and attract traditionally-aged students who seek to be involved on campus.
• Most are located on the east coast and in the upper mid-west.
• Within this general definition, there is a wide range or liberal arts colleges. Most are private, but a few are public. Some have religious affiliations. Some are highly selective in admissions and rather expensive (for example, Wellesley, Amherst, Swarthmore, Pomona, Williams, Carleton, Grinnell, Wheaton, Bowdoin, Bucknell, Colby, Vassar, Barnard, Colgate, Whitman, Kenyon, Smith, etc.), while others are more accessible. Some have experimental curricula (Reed, Hampshire).
Below is an account of liberal arts education that promotes this style of education, excerpted from collegenews.org. (http://www.collegenews.org/topliberalartscolleges.xml)
Though small in number when compared to America’s large public universities, liberal arts college graduates are represented disproportionately among leaders in the arts, education, science and medicine, public service and business. A 1998 study found that even though only 3 percent of American college graduates were educated at a residential liberal arts college, alumni of these colleges accounted for:
* 8 percent of Forbes magazine’s listing of the nation’s wealthiest CEOs in 1998
* 8 percent of former Peace Corps volunteers
* 19 percent of U.S. presidents
* 23 percent of Pulitzer Prize winners in drama, 19 percent of the winners in history, 18 percent in poetry, 8 percent in biography, and 6 percent in fiction from 1960 to 1998
* 9 percent of all Fulbright scholarship recipients and 24 percent of all Mellon fellowships in the humanities
* 20 percent of Phi Beta Kappa inductions made between 1995 and 1997
On a per capita basis, liberal arts colleges produce nearly twice as many students who earn a Ph.D. in science as other institutions. Liberal arts graduates also are disproportionately represented in the leadership of the nation’s scientific community. In a recent two-year period, nearly 20 percent of the scientists elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences received their undergraduate education at a liberal arts college.
What accounts for the distinctive contributions of top liberal arts colleges? In the end, it comes down to a matter of style and scale. Intentionally small in size, a residential liberal arts college permits the active engagement of faculty in promoting the learning of every individual student. Embracing a distinctive style of undergraduate education, these colleges foster a broad based knowledge and understanding of the humanities, sciences, and the arts and the cultivation of critical thinking and examination, skills that lie at the heart of liberal learning. In doing so, the nation’s top liberal arts colleges uniquely prepare students for lives of service, achievement, leadership and personal fulfillment.