<p>Views:</a> The Case of the Disappearing Liberal Arts College - Inside Higher Ed</p>
<p>Oh, so sad. Tiny, overpriced schools offering three majors are at risk of closing down.</p>
<p>^^^Obviously you didn’t read the article, so you shouldn’t comment because it just makes you look stupid.</p>
<p>that is really really sad</p>
<p>The ONLY colleges on my list with the exception of my safety are LAC’s and i absolutely love the focus on undergrad and the very small size</p>
<p>I would hate for the next generation to not have this opportunity</p>
<p>LACs fit an important niche and it would be too bad if they weren’t available for those who desire them.</p>
<p>With that said, some of the points made about the “success” of LACs (both in that article and the essay to which it links) strike me as poorly constructed and biased. Of course, LACs have higher placement in graduate programs - committing to a liberal arts curriculum essentially requires grad school to find a job later on. Since LACs aim for a broad curriculum rather than specific, job-oriented skills, getting a PhD is necessary in order to be attractive to employers who need focused skills.</p>
<p>Antioch is a sad case but I’m not sure how representative it is of any important trends. It has always been an unusual school. Its financial problems went back many years.</p>
<p>I’d like to see the list of the other ~74 failed colleges before jumping to the conclusion that they’re all dead canaries in the higher ed coal mine. Many other LACs seem to be thriving. Some of the top New England, midwestern, and west coast LACs are glutted with applications. Few if any of them have departments of business, communications or allied health, as far as I know.</p>
<p>It would be a bad sign though if more schools like Earlham or Goucher (other schools on the CTCL list) started failing. The fact that LACs exist at all is a sign we live in a prosperous country, one that can afford to educate people for something other than the specific, job-oriented needs of employers.</p>
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I agree. Besides, most of the top LACs have extraordinarily large budgets for their size. </p>
<p>Many of these tiny colleges (including the less selective ones) outcompete all major British universities except for Oxbridge in terms of raw endowment.</p>
<p>$220 million at Goucher
$335 million at St. Olaf
$100 million at Hollins</p>
<p>$170 million at UCL
$93 million at LSE</p>
<p>In fact, some LACs can even compete with major American universities for funding. Despite Fiyero’s snide comment, Williams and Grinnell have operating budgets larger than that of UT Austin.</p>
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<p>Contrary to what is often said, UK universities are not technically speaking “public” in the same sense as their French or German counterparts. To begin with, unlike in Germany or France, university assets in the UK are not state-owned and university faculty and staff are not civil servants/state employees. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, even though they are neither owned nor run by the state, British universities are, for the most part, state-funded. That means they receive grant money from the government not only for research (as it is also the case in the US), but also to cover teaching costs and other operating expenses. Because they are funded/subsidized by the state, endowment and, incidentally, tuition fees are not as critical to British universities as they are for example in the case of a private U.S. LAC.</p>
<p>Oxford and Cambridge are an exception in the sense that, although they are state-funded (“public” in a broader sense), they nevertheless have fairly large privately-held endowments, a significant portion of which, I assume, probably consists of illiquid assets such as land/real state owned by the Oxbridge colleges.</p>
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<p>There are almost no fields (besides industry, non-engineering science and academia) where getting a Ph.D. significantly (or even marginally) increases job prospects. This statements is almost completely false, especially considering that LACs still send way more kids to Ph.D. programs than universities with more directly vocational studies even when you remove students studying more job-oriented curriculum from the mix.</p>
<p>I’m not sure whether this is truly a trend or not, as the article is suggesting, but I think it’s important to note that the top 50 out of several hundred LACs doing well does not mean that the LAC system is not at serious risk. There are some LACs that are likely to never close, despite the waxing and waning of the desires of incoming students because they’ll always be financially sound and will always be able to attract a freshman class. However, I think the fear is that the LACs as a system are at risk right now of becoming an even smaller, more specialized niche with fewer players.</p>
<p>Rather than the tide moving toward supplying the undergraduate, teaching-centered model offered by LACs, students are moving toward the research university model. I wouldn’t qualify this as good or bad, but it’s certainly food for thought.</p>
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What exactly is your point? What job would you hire someone straight out of a liberal arts college to do? LAC students go on to graduate schools, medical schools, law schools, etc. to learn their job-oriented skills.</p>
<p>LAC’s are not disappearing in the near future. The truth of the matter is, a degree from an LAC is no different that a degree from a comprehensive school given you did not major in a pre-professional program. In other words, unless you majored in accounting, nursing, education and maybe engineering, the majors are essentially the same. (I know there are others!) </p>
<p>The truth is top LAC students from top LAC’s will be recruited over many/most other students-professional degree or not. In other words, a top economics student at Colgate will have a better chance than a business major at SUNY Genesco at banking.</p>
<p>Top LAC’s prepare their students for any field. They learn to think, research, analyze, interpret, write and conclude. This is done w/in a usually small class size environment.</p>
<p>DO NOT TELL ME THIS IS DISSAPPEARING!! THAT WOULD BE GOOD???</p>
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<p>Jobs in journalism? Advertising? Entertainment? Sales? Government?</p>
<p>Examples:</p>
<p>Herbie Hancock, Jazz Musician, left Grinnell College 1 course short of graduation.
Juan Williams, journalist & author, graduated from Haverford College.
Dave Barry, humorist, graduated from Haverford College.
Dan Brown, author of the DaVinci Code, graduated from Amherst College.
John Sayles, film director, graduated from Williams
Stephen Sondheim, composer, graduated from Williams
Steve Case, founder & former CEO of AOL, graduated from Williams
Thomas Rowe Price, founder of T.Rowe Price investments, graduated from Swarthmore
Jonathan I. Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, graduated from Wesleyan
Dana Delaney, actress, graduated from Wesleyan</p>
<p>Apparently, none of the above earned graduate or professional degrees. Those are just examples of famous people. A significant percentage of LAC graduates never go to grad school.</p>
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<p>The vast majority of LAC graduates do not go to grad school, and many prominent employers recruit at LACs.</p>
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<p>I looked up the Common Data Sets of 10 LACs for 2 recent academic years (2005-2006 and 2007-2008) to observe changes in the application rates, enrollments, admit rates and yields at schools representing various positions in the rankings. The table below summarizes what I found:</p>
<p>School … Applications…Enrollment…Admit rate…Yield
st.mary’s md…7%…-5%…-14%…4%
colorado college…18%…10%…-6%…3%
evergreen state…9%…15%…0%…2%
whitman …13%…11%…-1%…0%
rhodes college…0%…5%…2%…0%
middlebury…37%…16%…-3%…-1%
centre college…9%…0%…-2%…-1%
bryn mawr…8%…-1%…-1%…-2%
knox college…37%…-6%…-15%…-3%
earlham…12%…-7%…-1%…-5%</p>
<p>Observations: Application volume increased at 9 of the 10 schools, and in the 10th case was flat across these 2 periods. In some cases the application growth was dramatic. So far so good. Yet, half these schools showed declining or flat enrollments, despite the growth in applications. Only 3 showed an increase in yield. Only one school managed simultaneously to lower the admit rate, increase yield, and increase enrollment in this period of strong application growth. Two of the three LACs with increasing yields are public institutions (with much lower costs). </p>
<p>High school populations have peaked. As application numbers decline and cost pressures increase, I do wonder if some of these schools will find it increasingly difficult to maintain enrollments.</p>
<p>@tk21769: I was originally referring to the sciences and engineering. I thoughtlessly extended the point in my second post, and you are absolutely right to doubt it. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain… I’m not all the way here today.</p>
<p>"This longer-term and more significant trend was first highlighted by the economist David Breneman nearly 20 years ago in a 1990 article that asked, “Are we losing our liberal arts colleges?” At that time he concluded that many one-time liberal arts colleges were not closing, but gradually transforming into “professional colleges” as they added programs in vocational fields such as business, communications and allied health.</p>
<p>Recent research we have conducted using data from the National Center for Education Statistics confirms that the trend Breneman identified has continued. The 212 liberal arts colleges that Breneman identified in 1990 have now decreased to 137. Many former liberal arts colleges are evolving, consciously or unconsciously, into more academically complex institutions offering numerous vocational as well as arts and science majors. In the process, they may have lost the focused mission and carefully integrated academic program that for generations made small liberal arts colleges a model of quality undergraduate education. Most likely this trend will persist.</p>
<p>In a recent interview, Brian Rosenberg, president of Macalester College, predicted that 10 to 15 years from now there will be even fewer institutions that look like traditional residential liberal arts colleges. Little by little, we may be losing an alternative model of undergraduate education that has challenged and inspired many other types of higher education institutions to take risks, experiment, and improve the quality of their educational programs."</p>
<p>Northstar-- I’m glad someone read the article.</p>
<p>@noimagination: I love catching glimpses of humanity on the internet. I commend your apology and your acute awareness of your mistake (the “thoughtless extension”). Yay for humility!</p>
<p>…I just realized that a frank comment like that can seem sarcastic on the interwebz. I mean it genuinely =)</p>
<p>Anyway, I was impressed with the inclusion of this in the article- it seemed to show a good mind was writing it: “Our concern is not with change itself. Our concern is with the way change unfolds in our complex and loosely coordinated higher education system. Should evolution in higher education follow a Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ course or should we intervene to preserve and update valued types of educational institutions because of the important roles they play in serving our pluralistic society?”</p>
<p>Or maybe I liked it simply because it eloquently stated a rather nebulous idea I had. whatevs</p>
<p>It seems like when people on this thread are talking about how great LACs are, they reference top LACs. Top LACs are great and provide similar opportunities as universities at the same level. You can’t use examples from Williams and Haverford to generalize all LACs. Also, at the Colgate vs SUNY argument, you’re comparing a top LAC to a SUNY that isn’t even the best one. If you were to compare Colgate to say Emory business you might have a different outcome. </p>
<p>You need to consider the average LAC. At an average LAC or an average university you’re not going to be recruited by top companies and most employers outside of your region aren’t going to have any idea what your school is. The benefit you gain from a vocational major (nursing, engineering, accounting) is that you have a direct skill that is employable. There is nothing differentiating an english major from a history major from anything else. At least with a vocational major you have training and a skill set that only people in your major have, decreasing the number of people you compete with for any job.</p>
<p>About the article, it makes sense that LACs are increasing the majors they offer, and are even offering preprofessional majors. It attracts more applicants and stronger applicants. That means more money and prestige. You can still have a solid liberal arts background majoring in engineering if the school puts an emphasis on it.</p>
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<p>It may attract more applicants, but I’m not so sure about stronger ones. It may or may not attract more money. Personally, I don’t associate preprofessional majors with more prestige.</p>
<p>Grinnell has one of the largest endowments per student of any college or university. The closest thing to a preprofessional major I see there is “Technology Studies” or their “Program in Enterprise and Leadership”. No nursing, no communications, no allied health, no engineering.</p>
<p>You have to think about what the “liberal” in LAC means. It has to do with freedom. It means that families, and society as a whole, have accumulated enough wealth to send young people off for 4 years to think and talk about things that don’t necessarily have anything at all to do with earning a living.</p>