Large Liberal Arts Colleges?

[limitdoesntexist]

Tulane

[ucbalumnus]

Truman State is a relatively inexpensive public LAC that has about 6,000 students.

[nw2this]

Why not just spend time in the School of Arts & Sciences of a large school and/or join a liberal arts program like Blount at U Alabama. Also Google COPLAC - the public LACs many of which have around 5 or 6 thousand students.

[homerdog]

I was an engineering major at Northwestern and still got to take lots of classes in the College of Art and Sciences. Engineering there doesn’t feel like a large percentage of the school and I think it’s important to the university that all majors (music, theater, journalism, engineering, as well as liberal arts majors) get a broad education. No undergrad business school there at all.

[Mastadon]

@moooop - No, it is quite clear that you don’t understand.

I provided (non-working) links for a list of schools from the Carnegie Classification “Arts and Science Focus” , “large” and “medium” Category. Here is the list for the large schools and a link to the lookup engine:

Emory
Harvard
SUNY at Albany
Tufts
University of California Santa Cruz
U Chicago
Vanderbilt
Yale
http://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu/lookup/lookup.php

No BC, which is classified as “Arts and Sciences plus Professions”, and no RPI, which is classified as “Professions plus Arts and Sciences”.

In terms of the changing definition of a “liberal education”, here is an excerpt from the report “College Learning For The New Global Century” put out by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (1,300 member schools).

It basically says that professional majors need more exposure to the liberal arts and sciences and that liberal arts and science majors need more exposure to the professions. That is not the same as liberal arts majors should attend RPI and professional majors should attend Swarthmore.

In doing so, this report also calls on educators to adapt liberal education
to the needs of our time. Certain aims of liberal education are
enduring through every era, to be sure. Helping students master the
arts of inquiry, analysis, and communication is the signature strength
of a liberal education and a core reason why it is the best and most
powerful preparation both for the economy and for democracy.
But the key to continued national vitality is the ability of citizens
to adapt creatively to new challenges. Liberal education in the United
States did transform its practices, dramatically, just a century ago.
Starting about 1870 and continuing into the next century, the rise
of new disciplines and a new role for the United States in the world
led to revolutionary change in the organization of the undergraduate
curriculum. A comparably dramatic change in the approach to liberal
education is needed today to better prepare college graduates for the
complex realities of this new global century (see fig. 5).
The first step toward a contemporary approach to liberal education
is to remap the educational landscape so that all parts of the
academy and all fields of study address—in ways appropriate to their
subjects—the essential learning outcomes recommended in part 1
(see p. 12).

---

To take this step, higher education will also need to break out
of the academic categories and silos that were established in the last
curriculum revolution, and that still organize the division of labor
across most campuses, from community colleges to research universities.
As a result of the last curricular revolution, liberal or liberal arts
education is conventionally defined as study in selected academic
fields: the humanities, the social sciences, the sciences, and, by the last
quarter of the twentieth century, the arts as well. The many professional
and applied fields—including engineering, business, education, and
health—have not traditionally been seen as part of a liberal education.
The resulting lines of demarcation guide students’ educational choices
to this day on thousands of campuses. Because of these inherited dividing
lines, millions of college students are routinely compelled to choose
either a liberal arts and sciences pathway or a professional pathway just to
fill out their college applications. The message sent by this forced choice
is exactly the opposite of what students need to know.
The traditional boundaries between the liberal arts and the professional
fields are not just a bureaucratic inconvenience. In practice, they
have created academic silos that impede faculty and staff efforts to
foster a more holistic and integrative approach to college learning.

---

It is in everyone’s interest to create new crosswalks and communal
spaces that support educational collaboration across the traditional
academic dividing lines between the liberal arts and sciences and the
professional fields.

---

But if collaborations are to succeed, they need to be
based in shared goals. The essential learning outcomes, which place
strong emphasis on teaching students to integrate and apply their
learning, provide this larger sense of shared interests.

https://www.aacu.org/sites/default/files/files/LEAP/GlobalCentury_final.pdf

[tk21769]

^ That list of 8 schools appears to represent the results of the following inputs into the cited search engine
(http://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu/lookup/lookup.php):
…Undergraduate Instructional Program = “Arts & sciences focus, high graduate coexistence”
…Size and Setting = “Four-year, large, highly residential”
…Basic = “Doctoral Universities”
…Level = “4-year or above”

However, at the page cited above, there doesn’t appear to be any way to specify those 4 features directly.
You can enter the name of a school that you think represents those features (e.g. “Harvard”);
then click on the resulting link;
then (on the display page for Harvard) check the "dimensions of interest " (e.g. “arts & science focus, high graduate coexistence”) to find similar schools.

If you are not satisfied with that list of 8 colleges (post #24), you can enter the name of another school (e.g. Dartmouth), then check different “dimensions of interest” to find similar colleges.