What is a Liberal Arts School?

Up until I started researching colleges for our oldest son, I pictured a liberal arts school out of the movie Mona Lisa Smiles with Julia Roberts. Everyone taking English, History, Literature, Philosophy to become an “educated individual”. It wasn’t until I found USNW that I learned that I was a little off in my thinking.

Our son is at a LAC and his best friend is at a State University. In comparing the two programs’ general ed requirements. The LAC has two FYS, six Fields of Study, and a foreign language. The SU one FYS, five Fields of Study, and a language depending on the major.

There is an incremental difference between the two. Once you add in the AP placements and gen ed you cover with a major or minor it narrows it down more. By undergrad enrollment percentage ten of the top thirty feeder schools for Wall Street are what USNW calls LACs.

I understand how USNW classifies LAC and realize it is only terminology and that at the end of the day probably doesn’t matter. We live in a bedroom community for Wall Street. Very commonplace to heermy kid is at LAC X and is studying to become an investment banker. The term Liberal Arts college does not seem accurate and through experience with our own son at the least misleading.

General education requirements are not the distinction. LACs and universities could both have minimal (Evergreen State and Brown) or extensive (St. John’s College and MIT) general education requirements.

The main distinction is that LACs offer few or no graduate programs and are less likely to offer more obviously preprofessional majors like business.

6 Likes

I would argue that it is largely a matter of emphasis, not course offerings or even requirements. MIT has extensive Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences requirements. It has excellent courses taught by excellent teachers, so it’s not just a pro forma thging. But in no universe is it a LAC.

The most distinctive feature of LACs is that they, with very few limited exceptions, don’t offer in-depth specialization in any particular field. That’s why they generally don’t offer engineering, business, graduate degrees, etc. because these are all about specializations.

1 Like

I understand that for the most part that LACs have no or very limited graduate school programs. However in a quick count 22 of the top 50 LACs in USNW rankings offer engineering as an undergrad major.

You’re not going to find a bright line. There’s a LAC down the road that has a night MBA program, violating both the “graduate” and “business” rules.

Even the ones that purportedly offer engineering only offer some sort of “general engineering”, which presumably teaches some general engineering principles and methodologies, but no specialization.

Most offer and require majors, which is the typical level of specialization expected for undergraduates.

However, some undergraduates are more academically advanced and ambitious and want to take additional specialty courses (perhaps including graduate level courses) in their majors. That may be more of an issue at more selective LACs which are more likely to have more academically advanced and ambitious undergraduates due to their higher admission selectivity. Subjects where such students commonly enter at an advanced level (e.g. math) are also more likely to be those where such students encounter this issue.

2 Likes

Our son is a marketing major at a top 25 LAC and one of his best friends is Chemical Engineering major at a top 50 LAC.

Offering a major in a field doesn’t necessarily equate to an in-depth specialization in that field. One has to look at not only what the major requires but also what the school offers (courses and other major related opportunities such as research) in that field.

1 Like

I’m not entirely clear what you are asking about, so I’m just going with your original question, what is an LAC?

Harvard College is an LAC. It’s part of Harvard University. Most American colleges and university are rooted in the idea of a liberal arts education: “imparting general knowledge and developing general intellectual capacities, in contrast to a professional, vocational, or technical program.”

This is why so many colleges and universities have core requirements and why the common refrain of an American college student is “I’m never going to use Geometry again so why should I have to take a math class…or… I’m never going to use German again so why do I have to take it in college?”

It’s about educating students to understand things beyond the scope of their major. I think one of the main differences between an LAC and a university these days is that LACs very much promote themselves on the idea that smaller classes, from the start, lead to meaningful interaction with both students and professors. Class based discussion is a key component of a good LAC because it helps develop critical thinking skills.

Your post notes that a lot of highly paid graduates come from LACs. They also have high placement rates in grad programs and competitive prestigious scholarships. Universities can lead to those outcomes too, but there are a number of LACs that proportionally have very high positive outcomes with these things than it’s larger universities. As an example, Bates College in Maine won 24 Fulbright scholarships. In comparison, Harvard had 27.

Fwiw, my child attended Bates and my other child is currently at Binghamton. I can say without question that my Bates grad had a superior educational experience to the one my Bing kid is having, even though he loves Bing and is enjoying his classes more now that he is a junior. My Bates grad has so far been very successful in her career and we feel it was a good investment towards her future.

Again, I’m not sure what your question really is, but if I were a parent considering the environment my child might best thrive in, I would encourage them to give LACs a hard look.

4 Likes

I think there are distinct differences within schools classified as LACs. Not to criticize one approach from the other. Two schools that we looked at for our son were Franklin and Marshall and Bucknell. He was undecided on what he wanted to study but was potentially interested in Business.

Bucknell has a separate school of management and a more traditional pre professional programs. FM had a program called Business, Organizations and Society which was more of Liberal Arts approach to business.

2 Likes

In their purest form, LACs emphasize in-depth study in traditional liberal arts disciplines and topics, such as physics, chemistry, geosciences, biology, math, classics/philosophy, religious studies, history, political theory, literature and fine arts. Modern derivatives from these fields, such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and economics, are also popular.

4 Likes

We wanted our son to go to LAC because we felt it would give him the best opportunity to discover what really interest him, what he really wanted to pursue. I was surprised that the gen ed requirements of the LAC he chose were not more in number and more broad based. I thought going he would automatically get more of a liberal arts education if he went to a liberal arts school.

Our favorite story from an information session at an LAC we visited was about a girl who went there to study Theater Arts and took Chemistry her first semester, had a great teacher and became a Chemistry Major. Also because when Professors do research at an LAC the undergrads get the priority to participate in research.

The long story short is because she went to an LAC and found out she was passionate about Chemistry and really good at it. Got a chance to work on a research project to counteract Global Warming by attempting to make Carbon Dioxide more opaque so the rays of the sun would pass through it and not absorb the heat.

3 Likes

I guess if I answered my own question. What is a Liberal Arts School? I would say it would provide a broad-based education across multiple areas of study and promote critical thinking. My point is that it seems that there are a number of schools that are called and call themselves Liberal Arts schools that don’t necessarily promote a Liberal Arts education.

There are many differences between LACs & National Universities. Several have already been notrd above by @ucbalumnus & @1NJParent & @merc81 and others.

Campus environment is another factor which distinguishes the two categories of schools. LACs tend to have small enrollments typically of less than 2,000 students. National Universities expose students to a more diverse student body in many respects. Although many LACs are diverse, the numbers are small.

National Universities give students the chance to have multiple distinct friend groups and give one opportunities to be anonymous on occasion if so desired. At LACs a frequent comment /complaint is that it seems as though everyone knows each other’s business & that certain social cliques tend to dominate on campus.

Of course, National Universities offer a broader array of courses & majors as well as more sophisticated research opportunities.

In my view, LACs are more akin to prep schools while National Universities tend to be more reflective of the real world.

Both LACs & National Universities offer great opportunities regarding learning / education. An individual may thrive in one type of environment and feel either suffocated or overwhelmed in the other type of environment.

3 Likes

A few schools seem to hit a sweet spot, combining characteristics of the two. I feel fortunate that my daughter found one of them: William & Mary, a small national (state) university with a liberal arts ethos. At 6000 undergraduates, it is easy to connect with others (she is in a close-knit, small dorm) but also possible to find anonymity and diversity. She has one lecture hall class of 86 students but all the others are much smaller, and discussion-based. There are also 2000 graduate students, but I believe most of these are concentrated in law, business and education, and therefore don’t siphon most of the energy and attention from professors in the less pre-professional fields.

3 Likes

Yes, I think we should be careful about vocabulary, as “liberal arts school” and “liberal arts college” are not the same.

Yale College, Penn A&S, Duke Trinity, Cornell CAS, JHU Krieger, etc. are all liberal arts schools.

1 Like

We have had several family members attend Columbia, Chicago, and Northwestern. It was a bit shocking at how small many–maybe most–of the classes were. Almost always fewer than 20 students. (But, Columbia, Chicago, & Northwestern do consistently report the highest percentage of classes with fewer than 20 students among the top 300 ranked National Universities.)

Family members who attended Brown & Duke also experienced a lot of small classes, but not to the same extent as those who attended Columbia, Chicago, & Northwestern.

^
On this note, Wake Forest has fewer classes with 50+ students than quite a few of the top LACs.

1 Like