<p>What do colleges mean when they will provide an well rounded intellectual.... liberal Arts education???</p>
<p>What makes its different from a regular university?</p>
<p>When college and Liberal Arts come up in thesame sentence its a world of confusion and i start thinking of a boring( i know thats not true though)!!!</p>
<p>It means they’re strong in the things that ARENT your general sciences. (english, history).</p>
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<p>Wrong. Math and the physical and biological sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, and related fields) are part of the “liberal arts,” as are the humanities (English, classics, philosophy, foreign languages and literatures) and the social sciences (history, economics, political science, sociology, psychology).</p>
<p>Technical and pre-professional fields (engineering, business, law, medicine, education, architecture, nursing, etc) are not part of the liberal arts.</p>
<p>What distinguished a “liberal arts college” (often abbreviated LAC) is that it offers only math, science, humanities, and social science majors, and only at the undergraduate level. Liberal arts colleges typically do not have graduate programs (though some have a few small grad programs), and they do not have professional schools of engineering, law, medicine, business, etc.</p>
<p>A university offers both graduate and undergraduate education, and typically offers an array of professional programs, some at the graduate level (law, medicine, business MBA) and some at the undergrad level (engineering, perhaps nursing, sometimes business BBA). But in most universities, the undergraduate college of liberal arts is one of the largest academic units within the university. So, for example Harvard College is the undergraduate liberal arts college of Harvard University; Yale College is the undergraduate liberal arts college of Yale University; the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts is the undergraduate liberal arts college of the University of Michigan, and so on. But typically, the undergraduate liberal arts colleges within universities are larger than stand-alone Liberal Arts Colleges (LACs) like Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, or Wellesley, and the undergrad colleges at universities share their faculties with graduate programs in the same fields. The faculty at LACs are typically exclusively undergrad-focused.</p>
<p>Clear?</p>
<p>-__- i tried. yeesh.</p>
<p>@bclintonk I was wondering, at one LAC that interests me (Sarah Lawrence), they don’t seem to offer majors, and when a student graduates from there, they receive a Bachelors of Liberal Arts. Does that look bad to employers? Is it a meaningless degree as opposed to B.A. in Biology or English?</p>
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<p>What may be confusing to some people is that not all liberal arts colleges ensure that all of their graduates have a “well rounded liberal arts education”. For example, Amherst has no core, breadth, or general education requirements, meaning that there is less assurance that an Amherst graduate has taken a “well rounded liberal arts education” than an MIT graduate, who has to take 8 courses of math and science and 8 courses of humanities, arts, and social sciences.</p>
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<p>Neither biology nor English have particularly good job and career prospects at the bachelor’s degree level, so there probably is not a large difference.</p>
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<p>They don’t?</p>
<p>Washington & Lee is the #14 ranked LAC according to USNews. Yet W&L includes the Williams School of Commerce, Economics, and Politics where you can obtain a BS in Commerce while majoring in accounting and/or business administration. W&L also has a law school - indeed, the #30 ranked law school according to USNews, in fact, outranking the law schools at many large state universities such as Ohio State, Wisconsin, Maryland, Arizona, and Florida. </p>
<p>[About</a> the Williams School :: Washington and Lee University](<a href=“http://www.wlu.edu/x49353.xml]About”>http://www.wlu.edu/x49353.xml)</p>
<p>[School</a> of Law :: Washington and Lee University :: Lexington, Virginia](<a href=“http://law.wlu.edu/]School”>http://law.wlu.edu/)</p>
<p>Frankly, I’ve never been clear about what exactly is the difference between a “university” and a “LAC” - and even more confusingly, about why certain schools such as W&L that carry the university moniker are nevertheless classified as LAC’s. For example, why exactly are W&L or Bryn Mawr - which offers PhD programs - considered to be LAC’s whereas, say, Brown and Rice are considered to be “universities”?</p>
<p>Another reason why US New and World Report should be used for raw data only.</p>
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<p>There are many liberal arts colleges with ABET accredited engineering programs. Take Lafayette as an example.</p>
<p>There are not many - there are a few. That’s why bclintonk used the word typically.</p>
<p>The liberal arts are the fields whose skills and content aren’t obsolete five years after you graduate. :)</p>
<p>I said “typically” and I said LACs don’t have professional SCHOOLS of engineering, law, medicine, business, etc. A few—a distinct minority-- have engineering PROGRAMS but they typically don’t have a separate “school” or “college” of engineering as you would find at many major universities.</p>
<p>Similarly, a minority of LACs have a small number of graduate programs, typically in liberal arts fields. In most cases, though, they wouldn’t be organized in such a way that they have a separate graduate “school” with its own dean and administrative structure.</p>
<p>On the other hand, there are no rules about these things. There are some schools that are somewhere along the continuum between a classic liberal arts college and a small university, with a more complex structure and more graduate and professional programs than the typical LAC, but less than major research universities. US News rather arbitrarily assigns them to one category or the other, or tosses them into the “regional university” category, i.e., into oblivion for the rankings that most people look at. But the fact that US News labels some of these schools with engineering or business programs or a few graduate programs “liberal arts colleges” does not defeat the definition of a liberal arts college. They’re sort of anomalies, not quite liberal arts colleges in the classic sense, but close enough that US News places them in that category.</p>
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<p>[School</a> of Law :: Washington and Lee University :: Lexington, Virginia](<a href=“http://law.wlu.edu/]School”>http://law.wlu.edu/)</p>
<p>Clearly, there are exceptions to the rule. Putting it broadly, a liberal arts college (I would say) is a small (<3000 approximately) college that is more focused on undergraduate but may have graduate programs. Classes are generally not taught by TA’s, professors are more accessible and are there to teach more than research (more individualized attention). That’s what I think of when I think of an LAC.</p>
<p>Liberal Arts carries different majors and it is always an advantage taking one. I am Liberal Arts graduate and I have benefited from being to one. Found friends that last me a long time and I have benefited with my work because of my major.</p>