What defines a liberal arts university?

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Am I being too pedantic?

My first reaction to the thread, " Looking for New England LAC with Health Science/Kinesiology Major," was, if it offers health sciences or kinesiology as a major, then it’s not a liberal arts university. A college or university can be small without being an LAC. Maybe she just means a small school, but is conflating that with an LAC.

Responses in that thread include:
St. Michael’s College in Vermont, a small school that offers such majors as education studies, business administration, criminology, health sciences, and equity studies.

St.Lawrence University: Small college in NY that offers these preprofessional majors: digital media and film, finance, educational studies, prehealth chemistry, sports studies and exercise science.

Plymouth State University, in NH, offers: accounting, adventure Education, art education, business administration, exercise and sports physiology, finance, tourism management.

To me, an LAC offers majors only in academic disciplines – not in vocational subject matter that teaches job skills and content for a specific career.

With the exception of LACs that also offer engineering, like Union College.

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To me a LAC is a small college that offers undergraduate degrees. I would not eliminate a school from being considered a LAC for offering a “professional” major.

A few schools that I consider to be LACs do offer a limited number of “professional” majors including Lafayette, Union, Bucknell (engineering) and URichmond, Bucknell (business) to name a few. All LACs do have students studying fields such as economics and are looking to go into business, computer science majors, as well as pre-med/pre-law etc. students.

Edited to add: i just saw your qualification in the last line above…

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The profession a student intends to pursue has no bearing on whether the college is or is not an LAC. You can major in any liberal art (biology, math, art history, philosophy, psychology) and be premed, pre-law, pre-investment banking, whatever. I’m referring to the majors and courses of study offered.

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Just stating that many students at LACs are preparing for a career even if it will involve grad school.

However, I believe we are largely in agreement.

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Why does engineering (and now computer science) get a pass when defining a LAC or a liberal arts university? Some schools like Harvard long pretended that they did not offer engineering. it was the Division of Applied Science. They now have an engineering school so named.

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Yes, all of those pre-meds who default to majoring in biology, or all of those pre-laws who default to majoring in political science… of course, there is also the professional goal of doing academic research, which requires going to graduate school for a PhD in the subject (liberal arts or otherwise).

Other liberal arts majors may also be chosen for pre-professional reasons, like economics, math, or statistics by those aiming for finance jobs.

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I think in general, classifications are artificially established borders.

Someone wants to be in the Northeast. Does that mean Western Pennsylvania and Ohio are out?

So - can you be a liberal arts college with 10k kids (College of Charleston)? Or is Bucknell an LAC when they have engineering and business.

Is a university that doesn’t offer PHDs an LAC? Cal Poly.

We can give categories to anything - just like for work, I’m in the Southern Region - but it’s all artificially made up.

US News has decided that the service academies, Vassar, and Trinity University are LACs. The WSJ has just one classification.

Everything is made up. So I suppose an LAC can be whatever you want it to be.

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Is there such a thing as a “liberal arts” university?
By the time an institution offers a broad range of graduate programs, manytimes leading to a “terminal degree” for a particular professional direction/tenor, isn’t that in most cases mutually exclusive to “liberal arts”?

Rather, larger universities might house distinct “liberal arts colleges”, through which they deliver the traditional liberal arts studies, in additional to their specialized technical, professional, career, etc. colleges - and of course their various graduate schools.
So you couldn’t call that institution a “liberal arts university” ?

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Agreed, and I’d add that small graduate programs do not disqualify a college from being a LAC either – law at Washington & Lee, PhD programs at Wesleyan and Bryn Mawr, and so on.

I’d consider a university like Princeton a liberal arts university. With the exception of the school of public affairs, most of its academic offerings are in the arts and sciences. It depends on how one feels about its engineering programs, I suppose.

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Any graduate program is necessarily pre-professional, although for the purpose of defining a “liberal arts” school, a PhD program in a liberal arts subject may be an allowable exception for a “liberal arts university” that offers graduate programs.

But are there any schools which offer only liberal arts bachelor’s degrees and also offer graduate programs which are all PhD programs in liberal arts subjects?

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Maybe also Program in Architecture and Engineering | Civil and Environmental Engineering ?

Am I correct that you are referring to undergraduate studies at Princeton, vs. https://gradschool.princeton.edu/ ?

If so, I believe do see your point - it has “university” in its name, but unless for those who pick one of the other schools, much of its “college level” education focuses on liberal arts. Basically someone at Princeton forgot to create a “School of Arts and Sciences” :wink:

A long time ago, in a course on Boolean logic and algebra, a professor reminded me that definitions (by definition) cannot be “right or wrong”.

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I feel like it has changed, that liberal arts schools realized that to stay afloat and relevant, they needed to add in career ready studies such as business and STEM. This is what I am noticing at least.

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Science and math (the S and M in STEM) are already considered liberal arts, so they would not need to be added by a liberal arts school (although it is also true that science graduates do not necessarily find easy job markets).

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I would not consider schools that have significant grad offerings to be LACs.

But it is fine for every person to have his/her own definition of a LAC.

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Small programs have a negligible impact on institutional focus, IMO. A mere 14 undergrads graduated with a degree in architecture last year compared to 120 in public affairs (~9.5% of seniors) and 224 in engineering (~17.8% of seniors).

At the grad level, architecture accounts for 4.5% of master’s degrees and <1% of PhDs.

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I think the handful of traditional LACs that did not consciously become universities by the end of the 19th century pretty much came to terms with being prep schools for advanced degrees in law, medicine, business and STEM. Some graduates go right into graduate school; most postpone it until they’ve had a few years of experience under their belt. Computer science was a bit of a game changer because for the first time in close to a century there was a ready-made industry for something LACs could easily integrate into their curricula. Are there Carnegie Category universities that are sufficiently pristine in their devotion to the liberal arts? Dartmouth certainly comes to mind; they never even made the name switch that some other ex-LACs did (cough, Tufts.) Princeton comes very close. Chicago certainly gives off that vibe, despite the presence of a nationally respected law school. Columbia, not so much. Harvard not so much. Maybe, Brandeis?

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Whether it’s US News or anyone else, the ranking systems take their lead from the Carnegie Classifications. They then label them with their own terminology. There are 3 main Carnegie Classifications:

  1. Doctoral Universities (3 subcategories based on research activity)
  2. Master’s Colleges & Universities (3 levels of size)
  3. Baccalaureate Colleges

There are 2 subcategories of Baccalaureates Colleges:

A. Arts & Sciences Focus
B. Diverse Fields

So, a college could fit the Carnegie Arts & Sciences category and offer Engineering if Arts & Sciences is still their primary focus. Union College, founded in 1795, would be an example of such a college. They began offering Engineering in 1845, 50 years after their founding. In their most recent common data set, they report that 14% of their degrees were awarded in Engineering. So, Arts & Sciences (non-engineering) remains their primary focus as it always has been. The same would be true of Swarthmore and Lafayette, which both date their Engineering programs back to the 19th century.

On the other hand, it’s hard to make the argument that University of Richmond has a focus on undergraduate liberal arts & sciences when their School of Arts & Sciences is only one of 5 colleges which make up the university, when 35% of their undergraduate degrees were awarded in Business, according to their most recent common data set, when they also award multiple graduate degrees in Business, and when they also award law degrees through their Law School.

Frankly there are multiple pressures on colleges these days to offer return on investment, given the cost of college, which has been escalating at a much higher rate than the cost of living. Within the past 20 years or so we have increasingly seen LACs adding career tracks to remain competitive. Two examples which jump out at me were the additions of Engineering at Smith and Trinity in that time frame.

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I guess my reaction was to the notion of a major in “health sciences” or “kinesiology” being part of a liberal arts education, as was indicated in the thread. I suppose if the “health sciences” major also had distribution requirements in the humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, and language, the student could be said to be getting a liberal arts education. But my guess is that the vast majority of students who want to major in “health sciences” are not looking for wide distribution requirements or a core curriculum.

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More overtly pre-professional majors can be done at colleges with extensive liberal arts general education requirements (California State Universities being examples). Meanwhile, liberal arts majors may be done at college with minimal general education requirements (Amherst and Brown being examples well known around here).

A liberal arts major may have electives or emphasis that accommodates more pre-professional students. Examples include physical education or exercise science within a biology major, or managerial economics and finance within an economics major.

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If we make the definition too broad, it loses meaning. To me there are 2 primary dimensions, (1) the primary purposes and actual courses of study and (2) the size of the undergrad body.

With respect to 1, there should be a committed focus to undergraduate teaching in subjects where the goal is imparting knowledge and inquiry into the academic subject itself vs technical training that can be directly applied to a trade or profession. There is a difference between majoring in history or economics and having success being hired into banking, consulting, industry or going to law school – your successful outcome was not based on your knowledge of those subjects but because your success in doing well in those subjects will likely translate into success in those careers vs majoring in finance or accounting where your technical skills and knowledge have their own value.

Size of the undergraduate body also matters. There is a much more intimate educational experience where you know most people in your class and certainly most everyone in your major. Class sizes also matter as well as who the primary instructors are.

Of course there is continuum as we look at individual schools. A school that has courses in accounting, finance would probably not by that fact be disqualified, but a school with significant numbers of students majoring those areas (unless it were in a separate school), I would not consider a LAC. I do think it is possible to have a LAC within a larger university system if it is clearly segregated as to courses and student body.

There should also be a distinction between a LAC and a liberal arts education. I would not consider Harvard College to be a LAC because of its size and university focus on research vs undergrad education, but it certainly does provide a liberal arts education to its undergrads.

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