<p>Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Brown, and Dartmouth have significant percentages of engineering majors. Although these schools will set a aside a goodly portion of a student’s schedule for non-engineering courses, they will still need to focus on STEM areas in order to keep their graduates employable and retain ABET certification.</p>
<p>Does Dartmouth offer a four-year engineering degree? They didn’t use to. You had to go for 5 years to get a B.E. because of the liberal arts philosophy.</p>
<p>tk21769,</p>
<p>“Liberal arts education” as defined in this thread appears to me to be uniquely American. </p>
<p>Some continental European countries, e.g. France, have a broad, comprehensive secondary school education that is somewhat reminiscent of a “liberal arts curriculum”, but, unlike in the US, have specialist bachelor’s/master’s degrees at the university level.
On the other hand, in countries like the UK, specialization begins even earlier (in High School actually, with the A-Level system) and undergraduate degrees are very specific, although it is sometimes possible to concentrate on two or, more rarely three, related subjects, e.g. Economics and History; Philosophy and Mathematics; Philosophy, Politics, and Economics; Mathematics and Computer Science; etc. There are also a few courses like Cambridge’s NatSci Tripos that allow you to study physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics equally in the first year and then specialize later. However, there is nothing comparable to a “general education” or “liberal arts curriculum” as in the US, nor there is a widespread opinion that such general education program should be either useful or have any meaningful advantage over a specialist degree. </p>
<p>I guess one could try to compare a continental European, a British-patterned, and a US-styled LAC education based on objective metrics for outcome and attainment, but such comparison is tricky considering that those metrics are affected by other external factors (e.g. national or personal income, university funding, social class and overall social structure, etc.) that would have to be carefully controlled in any reliable study. In other words, arguments are never as simple as “LACs produce a large number of future PhDs, hence LACs are good”. </p>
<p>Also, as mentioned before by someone in the thread, there are “liberal arts education and liberal arts education”. Just to illustrate with (statistically meaningless) anectodal evidence, out of the total population of US students, both in High School and in college, who take one or more foreign language classes, what percentage do you think can be considered to have a real functional knowledge of the language they are studying ?</p>
<p>Higher education in the US is quite different than abroad and has been practically since its inception. I have no sense of the meaning of the term “liberal arts” in Europe, if the term even exists. I’m relatively certain that if it does it refers to something entirely different than the US definition. Post-secondary education in Europe is far more specialized and has been for some time-- in fact, the meaning of a bachelor’s degree is fundamentally different overseas so why would we assume that curriculum choices would be the same?</p>
<p>As for whether it even makes sense to try and compare the two styles of education-- why bother? If you’re not seeking a liberal arts education there are plenty of majors/concentrations and universities which can accommodate you. We’re not really discussing the merits of the liberal arts so much as defining them and talking about structures which attempt to teach them.</p>
<p>Also, I think the question as to whether taking one foreign language classes results in functional knowledge of the language precisely misses some of the points we’ve been making throughout this thread.</p>
<p>Re: my earlier post about the U of C and Brown.
I meant that Brown admissions officers must spend less time convincing applicants and admits of the value of a liberal arts education than Chicago admissions officers do.
In my mind, this has less to do with some of the wonderful discussion on this thread between differing philosophies of education or the sophistication of the two schools’ applicants. I think it has more to do with 17 year olds perceiving more practical obstacles to their goals at the U of C than at Brown.
I also have a different take on the U of C Admissions Office than some. I think the push in the last decade or so has been to increase applications, not to discourage drive-by applications. Evidence for this includes sitting down with USN&WR to see how the school could submit its data to better advantage (resulting in a clear bump in the school’s rank), adopting the Common Application, and a much more professional marketing campaign. Think “The Life of the Mind”. I am almost ready to believe that the distinctive application questions are a part of the branding campaign, but I’m not sure whether or not that’s true.
In any case, current students less and less meet the U of C stereotype of students interested in learning for learning’s sake that characterized undergraduates ten and fifteen years ago, and for decades before that, from everything I’ve heard. In my opinion this has to do with demographics and wider changes in society, but plenty of people on campus blame the admissions office.</p>
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<p>Danas, is it possible that your interpretation and mine are both correct?
In other words, yes of course, Admissions wanted to increase applications, but at the same time Ted O’Neill wanted to do so without losing distinctive characteristics of the student body. Any chance he left Admissions because he thought he was losing control of that balance?</p>
<p>I’m not sure tk-- but I do believe that in this book ([Amazon.com:</a> Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education: David L. Kirp, Elizabeth Popp Berman, Jeffrey T. Holman, Patrick Roberts, Debra Solomon, Jonathan VanAntwerpen: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Einstein-Bottom-Line-Marketing/dp/0674016343/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242141775&sr=1-1]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Einstein-Bottom-Line-Marketing/dp/0674016343/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242141775&sr=1-1)) Kirp talks specifically about a crisis of identity faced by UChicago in the mid-90s stating they absolutely had to increases number of applicants and selectivity to maintain its standing as a top institution. Guide books were coming out at the time touting how more UChicago students were in fraternities than at Brown (no, really, specifically that example) in an attempt to combat the sense that UChicago was, for lack of a better phrase, a miserable place.</p>
<p>I don’t know O’Neill left or the origins of those questions in particular, but I do know there was a clear concerted effort at that time to increase applicants for fear that UChicago could no longer continue to do what it did so well otherwise.</p>
<p>That being said, I think that danas remarks that students “perceive more practical obstacles to their goals at U of C then at Brown” is still quite vague. If she’s say what I think, I’m not sure that I agree that her conclusion is well-founded.</p>
<p>I agree that far less students want to “learn for learnings” sake, but I think that has to do with changing expectations of society placed on the university alongside changing demographics of college students in the United States, period. There are still enough highly qualified individuals to fill the top schools who have that mentality, and bringing them to campus is the admissions department’s job, however, I don’t think admissions has any to take on any blame for the changing motivations of the applicant pool as a whole.</p>
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<p>ModestMelody, you are right, the most successful schools for Ph.D. production tend to be LACs. Only one national liberal arts university shows up on the top ten. That school is the University of Chicago, which is rather LAC-like, but which also has a strong Core curriculum and has been influenced by the GB model. At least one of the LACs, Reed, which also is not a “Great Books” school, nevertheless has strong distribution requirements and enforces heavy exposure to Great Books in its required 1-year “Humanities 110” course.</p>
<p>I think you probably are correct that it is not the GB or Core model per se but some other factors that tend to come along with the GB/Core package. By implication, if we could isolate these factors, we could optimize for them in schools that use another model such as the Open Curriculum. Conversely, if we could isolate the success factors that tend to go along with the OC model, we perhaps could optimize for those in other schools (assuming the factors and the models are not mutually incompatible).</p>
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<p>We spent some time in another thread discussing the British/Oxbridge admissions system and the role of their notorious interview questions. I assume the interviews are more or less representative of the kind of exchange that is meant to occur in an Oxford or Cambridge tutorial. If so, then despite the early specialization there, it seems to me that the pedagogical aims of their model are not necessarily far different from the aims of US-style liberal learning. In respects other than breadth, of course. </p>
<p>Breadth, that is, is not the sole objective of a liberal arts education. It may not even be the core objective. The indispensable element, I think, has more to do with fostering a certain kind of inquiry in discovering and disseminating knowledge. That’s why we many of us can agree that a GB, Core, Distribution, and Open Curriculum model all can succeed. Though we may differ as to which model makes it easier to foster the objectives, given one or another set of assumptions.</p>
<p>In the 1990s the University of Chicago also faced financial challenges due in part to the cost of PhD programs and the large number of graduate students vis a vis undergraduates. Not only are there more paying customers among the undergraduates, alums tend to identify with and contribute to their undergraduate schools rather than their graduate schools.<br>
The decision was made to increase the size of the undergraduate school and scale back the size of the PhD programs, and to eliminate the Education Department (a graduate school founded by John Dewey).
In most ways this has been a fabulous success. It’s impossible to forget the ham-handedness of previous public relations efforts. One was to trumpet the fact that the University had the second largest police force in the State of Illinois. Another was a statement by an admissions officer, after a rise in female applicants- “See, women aren’t afraid of coming here”!
The increase in size of the College in the scheme of the University has led to a more undergraduate feel than previously. The male-female numbers are at parity. And the increase in the size of the College coincided with the echo-boom wave and a greater interest in elite education generally. The admissions rate has fallen from 70% toward 30%.
Most notably, the undergraduate student body is just much stronger than previously. The SAT numbers show it, and the College is no longer the weak sister in the University constellation. It is very apparent in conversation that these are just smarter kids. I end up not having to finish sentences, and students automatically see implications and gin things up a cognitive level or two immediately. That happened much less often ten and fifteen years ago.
I didn’t predict that the increase in the size of the College would be as successful as it has been.</p>