Best Practices of Liberal Arts Education: Curricula in Liberal Arts Colleges

Liberal Arts at the Brink

Reviewed by: Liberal Arts at the Brink Patrick E. Connelly (bio) Victor E. Ferrall Jr. (2011). Liberal Arts at the Brink. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 167 pages. ISBN 978-0-674-04972-7. $25.95. While liberal arts colleges account for only 2 percent of the total college enrollment in the United States, the image of the liberal arts campus is now synonymous with higher education as a whole. College is imagined as the student wandering a bucolic campus, learning from dedicated teachers, and experiencing residential living—all hallmarks of a liberal arts college. Yet education at liberal arts colleges is under attack. Most institutions face increasing competition for a limited pool of students, operate with undersized endowments, live with the financial drain of facility- and teaching-heavy environs, and exist with confusion over what defines the liberal arts. Put simply, liberal arts institutions face enormous challenges. Victor Ferrall Jr.’s book Liberal Arts at the Brink examines the obstacles facing liberal arts colleges today, as well as the role they play in U.S. society. Ferrall’s thesis is simple: liberal arts colleges are worth saving. In his words, “Society needs well and broadly educated citizens. . . . Liberal arts colleges, while not the only vehicles for producing liberally educated citizens are among the best” (16). Using the 2009 U.S. News and World Report list of the “Best Liberal Arts Colleges,” Ferrall looks at 225 private liberal arts colleges divided into four tiers based on ranking. Examining these institutions, Ferrall identifies a number of challenges faced universally by liberal arts colleges, including a failed budget model, decreased demand for a liberal arts education, increased competition among peer institutions for the same students, curriculum design, and an inability to develop cooperative strategies. Using specific examples from liberal arts colleges as well as data from 225 liberal arts colleges compiled from the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, he looks at internal and external barriers to the [End Page 527] long-term success of liberal arts colleges. These barriers include limited finances, the increasing vocationalization of the undergraduate education, and the obstacle of infusing an understanding of the goals and mission of the liberal arts education into societal discourse. Ferrall paints a picture of David versus Goliath, with liberal arts colleges fighting for their survival against the behemoth that research universities have become, as well as the rapid rise of for-profit colleges in the United States. What becomes apparent in Ferrall’s discussion is that research institutions and for-profit colleges would benefit from becoming more liberal-arts-like in their culture and structure. Ferrall defines liberal arts in two distinct ways, as an institution and as an ideal. For most people in the United States, the liberal arts is viewed as a small, residential college with caring faculty and staff who are committed to teaching over research and educating the whole student (18). Yet the liberal arts as an ideal is larger, and Ferrall challenges his reader to look at the core concepts of the liberal arts: a sense of intimacy in education, a community where learning is a value in and of itself, where curiosity, creativity, and questioning are celebrated. These are the concepts that make the liberal arts so important to a democratic society. While Ferrall’s focus is on the liberal arts, many of his critiques of the role of teaching, tenure, publication, and the goals of education are universal and can be broadly applied across higher education. Is the goal of higher education to prepare students for a singular job, or is it to help students acquire the core knowledge and skills allowing them success no matter their life path? Ferrall passionately argues, “Learning is of value in and of itself, without regard to whether it is directly linked to a marketable skill” (18). While Ferrall does a good job discussing the importance of academic faculty to the liberal arts, he ignores the role played by other college personnel. Today’s liberal arts colleges have vibrant out-of-class curricula that enhance student learning and support the core tenets of the liberal arts. By not discussing the role played by other areas within...

Reviewed by: Remaking College: Innovation and the Liberal Arts ed. by Rebecca Chopp, Susan Frost, and Daniel H. Weiss Jamie Y. Whitaker Campbell Rebecca Chopp, Susan Frost, and Daniel H. Weiss (Editors.). Remaking College: Innovation and the Liberal Arts. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins Press, 2014. 232 pp. Hardcover: $45.00. ISBN: 1421411342. Student dollars follow trends in higher education as easily as those same dollars follow trends in fashion. Yet, there will always be consumers of that which is classic – the white button down shirt or the little black dress will always be in style. If anything, minor adjustments to these items to maintain their relevancy is all that is needed. Similarly, Rebecca Chopp, Susan Frost, and Daniel H. Weiss’s edited collection of essays Remaking College: Innovation and the Liberal Arts argues that liberal arts colleges, a classic choice for American higher education, must attend to the concerns of accessibility and cost, technological advancement, and vocational significance to remain relevant. As higher education institutions continue to navigate the quagmire of external and internal pressures and concerns that clamor for the attention of administrators, faculty, students, and parents alike, Remaking College presents a collaborative attempt to navigate the tensions of the immediate while preserving the foundational elements that make liberal arts colleges a uniquely American staple of higher education. The editors and their contributors, many of whom run notable institutions such as Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr, begin with the simple assertion that liberal arts colleges are survivors, institutions that have persisted despite the various challenges that have always faced higher education. As they note in the introduction, “[t]he contemporary residential college is a surprising case study in flexibility, strength, and irrepressibility, all key components of the kind of resiliency that individuals and institutions need in the twenty-first century” (p. 1). They argue that liberal arts colleges, like the simple white shirt, are adaptable to any age. The thesis is simple: liberal arts colleges are uniquely positioned to innovate and educate for a global, technologically progressive world. Remaking College is divided into six parts, representing the key areas of the work’s inquiry: (1) Reimagining the Liberal Arts College in America; (2) An Opportunity to Lead; (3) Knowledge, Learning, and New Technologies; (4) Collaboration and Partnerships; (5) Residential Communities and Social Purpose; and (6) Future Prospects for the Liberal Arts College. With these divisions as pattern pieces, Chopp and Weiss begin Part 1 by exploring what makes liberal arts education valuable and distinct, inviting their peers to embrace the call for innovation prompted by the challenges facing higher education today. Subsequent parts of Remaking College embrace the layout provided by Chopp and Weiss’s essays, attempt to provide commentary on the array of issues perplexing liberal arts colleges today while providing insight into the ways liberal arts college leaders view the critical issues of the day. Chopp and Weiss begin their reimagining of liberal arts colleges by reasserting the commonly held belief that liberal arts colleges – through their emphasis on critical thinking, character development, and practical knowledge – provide students with an education that prepares theme to pursue both individual and communal good. Countering current critiques of liberal arts colleges as elitist and expensive, Chopp argues that change for liberal arts colleges can come from embracing knowledge design and intentional community as means of educating students that are primed by social learning for direct engagement. For Chopp, “knowledge [End Page 145] design… place[s] creativity and agility at the heart of learning and scholarship by embracing new learning platforms and recognizing the power of visualization and the remixing of knowledge” (p. 19). Intentional community, then, is the context in which knowledge design and learning engagement occur – a convenient argument for residential liberal arts colleges that have long touted the educational benefit of the residential experience as an extension of the classroom. Chopp’s embrace of the missional language of “life together” (p. 23) serves as a moral and educational imperative for liberal arts colleges in the higher education landscape. In Chapter 2, Weiss argues that the most significant, immediate challenge for higher education is the need “to realize an academically compelling, publically comprehensible and economically sustainable vision in an environment...

Despite the rising demand for vocational and practical education, the values of liberal arts education are still highly regarded, and many higher education institutions have been integrating liberal arts education as an approach to the development of a well-rounded education, flexible and creative thinking, civic engagement, and internationalization. For instance, several of the oldest, private liberal arts colleges in the USA continue to thrive and attract first-class students (Chopp R, Frost S, Weiss D (2013) Remaking college: innovation and the liberal larts. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore). East Asian universities, particularly those in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China, show an increasing interest in liberal arts education, and small, independent dedicated liberal arts colleges and general education programs have been developed in these countries (Jiang YG (2014) Liberal arts education in a changing society: A new perspective on Chinese higher education. BRILL, Leiden; Jung IS, Nishimura M, Sasao T (2016) Liberal arts education and colleges in East Asia: Possibilities and challenges in the global age. Springer, Singapore).

Introduction At least two problems face most liberal arts colleges in the 1990s. First, although the annual population of high-school graduates is expected to rise slowly in the United States through the remainder of the decade, regional differences indicate that a disproportionate number of liberal arts colleges are located in areas projected to lose high-school graduates in the years ahead (Breneman, 1994; Chronicle of Higher Education, 1995). Second, the curricular trend in higher education since about 1970 has been toward studies related to work (Knox, Lindsay, & Kolb, 1993). The shift from liberal arts to professional curricula arose primarily as a demand-driven response to changing student interests caused by shifts in the labor market for college graduates (Breneman, 1994). Enrollment concerns in recent years have compelled many liberal arts colleges to abandon or sharply scale back their arts and sciences curriculum in order to accommodate student preoccupation with the immediate job market. In the words of economist David W. Breneman, Many of these colleges shifted curricular focus during the 1970s and 1980s to meet student demands and to maintain enrollments, with the changes occurring quietly and largely unnoticed, by campus (Breneman, 1994, p. 2). Under such changing conditions, the retention of a liberal arts claim in the academic mission statements of these colleges becomes inconsistent with their professional curriculum. Three questions guide this study. How prevalent are liberal arts claims in higher education? To what extent are liberal arts claims made by colleges with curricula dominated by professional disciplines? Which institutional characteristics explain inconsistency between liberal arts claims and curricula? Background Colleges and universities in the United States make many claims about what they do for students. The current proliferation of popular college guides suggests that these claims are powerful symbolic devices that administrators and consumers deem meaningful (Schmitz, 1993). For example, many institutions claim to provide students with a liberal arts education. The following, published in Peterson's Guide to Four-Year Colleges (Peterson's Guides, 1993), are typical of such academic mission statements: [This university] affirms the enduring value of liberal learning - the 2,500-year tradition dedicated to developing the whole person and to forming habits of reflective thought that last a lifetime (p. 1110). The liberal arts curriculum exposes students to the major branches of study and builds their skills of communication, critical thinking, reasoning, and research (p. 1382). [At the college] students receive a liberal arts education that challenges them to excel in the humanities, the sciences, and the arts; cultivates social values; and inspires lifetime goals (p. 1822). Surprisingly, so rich a source of data as the public claims made by institutions in college guides and course catalogs has rarely been tapped. Most assessments of the academic missions of colleges and universities focus on developing technically accurate indicators. For example, the Classification of Higher Education was developed in 1970 and remains an important resource for academe. The 1994 Carnegie Classifications groups colleges and universities into 11 categories (for example, Baccalaureate Liberal Arts Colleges I, Baccalaureate Liberal Arts Colleges II, Doctoral Universities I, and others) designed to reflect their academic missions. Institutions are classified according to: the highest level of degree awarded; the number of degrees conferred by discipline; the selectivity of admissions; and, in some cases, the amount of federal research support received (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1994). Although these criteria add clarity to the classification process, the focus on objective indicators has left researchers knowing more about the descriptive statistics of higher education than about what is presumably more obvious, i. …

Newman's celebrated work, The Idea of a University, offers a number of valuable lessons for those who are interested in the renewal of the contemporary church-related liberal arts college. Three ideas have special appeal: (1) liberal arts education is the principal business of the baccalaureate institution, (2) liberal arts education is intrinsically valuable, and (3) liberal arts education is incomplete without the study of religion. All three of these ideas have been either subordinated or abandoned by many private colleges. In responding to market forces and internal political pressures, the historic liberal arts colleges of the church have lost their way. Reform will not come easily, and when it does, it will be incremental. Green Mountain College offers a useful example of an institution that has taken steps to implement the three ideas associated with Newman's classic work.

How can CS faculty at liberal arts colleges better communicate with colleagues and the public about the value our institutions offer? Liberal arts colleges play an important role in undergraduate CS education. Liberal arts skills are widely valued in the tech industry, many liberal arts undergraduates go on to earn Ph.D.s in STEM, and many of the educational innovations presented at SIGCSE are developed by liberal arts faculty. Yet, our colleagues at research universities often misunderstand what we do at liberal arts colleges. And while we see the liberal arts and computer science as supporting each other, the popular media tends to portray them as diametrically opposed. These misconceptions limit our opportunities to attract new students and colleagues, as well as opportunities to contribute to public discourse about the important role of information technology in our society. In this BoF, we aim to collaboratively develop communication strategies for individual participants and for the liberal arts CS community as a whole.

It is often said that liberal education is in crisis. A long line of books has lamented the decline of the liberal arts tradition for almost a hundred years. But if the symptoms of this crisis are familiar, the nature of the crisis is strange. It is not just that liberal arts colleges are failing to achieve their aims, but that there is a striking lack of clarity about the aims themselves. This lack of clarity does not afflict other institutions. The aim of the research university is to produce and disseminate scholarship and scientific knowledge. The aim of the vocational university is to give students technical expertise and marketable skills. But the aim of the liberal arts college is shrouded in platitudes. The words in which we think about higher education have become so vague and confused it is hard to say precisely how liberal arts colleges differ from research and vocational universities, what they offer that other institutions do not, and why they should exist. The crisis has deep roots. It goes back to the emergence of the research university in the nineteenth century, which altered the assumptions underlying traditional views of higher learning, and shifted the meanings of the basic words in which we think about education. It is because of this deep shift in our assumptions and language that we find it difficult to articulate precisely the nature and aims of liberal education. Catholic colleges matter today because they endured and responded to that shift in an exemplary way, and because the resources of the Catholic intellectual tradition can help us to retrieve and rethink the traditional aims of liberal education. What then has happened to liberal arts colleges? What is the situation of liberal education today? And how can we best understand and respond to that situation? Criticism and Crisis Critics of higher education tend to repeat a set of standard charges. 1. Academic work has become too specialized. 2. Scholarship has become narrow, trivial, and insular. 3. Academics tend to write in a technical jargon that is opaque to outsiders. 4. The undergraduate curriculum has become fragmented and incoherent. 5. Undergraduate education is adrift without any sense of common purpose. 6. Liberal education has become increasingly irrelevant in a world dominated by modern science and technology. 7. Liberal education is economically useless. 8. Liberal education no longer centers on the arts of language. Hence: (a) The quality of academic speech and writing is deplorable; and (b) academics fail to teach students to listen, speak, read, and write. (1) 9. College students are being taught to do independent research, but are not learning to think for themselves. The traits of the crisis are obvious, but its causes are not. How are these traits related? Where do they come from? What are their underlying grounds? To understand this crisis we need a genealogy of the liberal arts college. Very briefly: despite the internal tensions within the liberal arts traditions, liberal education was originally grounded in a number of core assumptions--about the nature of truth, tradition, language, the self, and education. These assumptions supported the distinctive institutions of the traditional liberal arts college: its curricula; pedagogies; disciplinary divisions; the roles of faculty and students; and the language in which education was understood. These institutions and their underlying assumptions were challenged with the emergence of modern science. The thinkers who founded the modern sciences profoundly altered traditional concepts of truth, tradition, the self, and education, and these new concepts laid the foundations of the modern scientific research university. But the research university did not simply replace the liberal arts college. …

This article examines the prominent narrative asserting that liberal arts colleges have continuously declined in number and status over the past 130 years. Bruce A. Kimball identifies problems in this declension narrative and proposes a revision positing that the decline of liberal arts colleges began only after 1970. Further, he maintains that the fraction of the U.S. population enrolling in collegiate liberal arts programs has remained surprisingly consistent over the past two centuries. That same fraction continues after 1970 because universities began to replicate the liberal arts college by establishing honors programs, and student enrollment after 1970 shifted from liberal arts colleges to the new subsidized honors programs in universities. Kimball concludes that this shift does not ensure that the fraction of enrollment in collegiate liberal arts will continue to remain consistent in the future. There is reason to doubt the long-term commitment of universities to supporting honors programs devoted to the traditional liberal arts college mission of fostering culture, community, and character, although this mission grows more important and complex as access to and diversity in higher education increase.

Patents on the traditional mission of liberal arts education have expired. Generic versions of that mission are now regularly included in even the most specialized under graduate curricula. In the marketplace, meanwhile, the undi luted liberal arts experience is battling the pressures of escalat ing costs, rising tuitions, and increasing demands for career training as a primary component of undergraduate study. These pressures alone weigh heavily on the future of independent residential liberal arts colleges. However, their impact is com pounded by the contemporary environment of social change and societal demands. As a result, the educational estate of these colleges is being fundamentally challenged and their con tinuing viability seriously threatened. This essay will address the following questions: In view of their acknowledged problems, have liberal arts colleges lost their relevance and do they, in terms of their traditional mission as liberal arts colleges, face extinction? If so, and the natural selection process is allowed to proceed, does it matter? If it matters, why? What are the options for survival? And would responsible citizenship, as an active ingredient, contribute significantly as a force for breathing new life and viability into the liberal arts mission?

This chapter explores the school-to-work transition process of individuals from a liberal arts university in Hong Kong, drawing inspiration from the metaphorical notion of “Life is a wilderness.” The controversy surrounding liberal arts education stems from an ongoing debate between its proponents, who advocate for its holistic approach to cultivating well-rounded individuals with broad knowledge and transferable skills, and its critics, who question its practicality and economic value in an increasingly specialized and job-market-driven society. Through qualitative research involving in-depth semi-structured interviews, this study aims to unravel the multifaceted challenges these individuals encounter as they move from the sheltered environment of a liberal arts education to the professional realm. By analyzing the journeys of five local individuals who earned their first degrees at University X—a liberal-arts-oriented institution—the findings reveal that these individuals have achieved significant personal growth thanks to their university education. However, situated in a society characterized by rapidly evolving social and economic realities, individuals’ career development has been confronted with various expectations and psychological struggles. Yet by employing strategies including enhancing strong points, redefining career goals, and reshaping social identity, these graduates have sought to navigate their transition with prudence, confidence, and perseverance. This chapter adds to the existing literature on the career transitions of liberal arts graduates while underscoring the importance of personal agency, institutional support, and societal context in shaping individuals’ transition experiences.

As a result of developing questions to investigate the difference in the perceptions and educational needs of professors and students concerning the competency-based liberal arts curriculum, and through conducting a corresponding survey, 33 professors and 502 enrolled students responded for two weeks in November of 2022. The analysis method utilized the Borich Demand Formula and the Locus for Focus Model. First, as a result of examining the difference in perceptions between professors and students about liberal arts education in A college, the survey found that students had a positive perception of the liberal arts curriculum compared to professors regarding all of the questions. Both professors and students were highly aware of the ‘relevance of liberal arts education level’ while the items showing statistically significant differences were the questions dealing with the ‘adequacy of the number of subjects opened’ and the ‘help to grow as professionals’. Second, as a result of analyzing the educational needs of our university's liberal arts curriculum using the Borich Formula and the Locus for Focus Model, the professors cited ‘lectures with teaching methods suitable for learning’, ‘sufficient communication with students’, and ‘diversity in liberal arts course selection’. Student ‘B’ determined that ‘lecture progress with a teaching method suitable for the learning content’ was their top priority when it came to improvement. Based on these results, to operate a better liberal arts curriculum, we need to seek ways to expand the range of choices for liberal arts education. Furthermore, we need to derive important basic vocational skills according to majors during the reorganization of liberal arts education at universities. This means that liberal arts education needs to reflect these changes in both its design and operational aspects. However, due to the different enrollment periods and limited graduation credits allocated to each department, there are real limitations in designing a course that fully reflects these educational demands. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze in detail the students' needs in order to immediately meet their educational goals, and to establish a flexible curriculum that reflects their demands for non-subject programs.

In his important article Science Patterns [9], former MAA president Lynn Steen provides us with a state-of-the-discipline report on modern mathematics. Steen divides the mathematical sciences into three parts of roughly comparable size: statistical science, core mathematics, and applied mathematics. Currently, core mathematics dominates both the faculty and curriculum departments mathematics at liberal arts colleges. Although Steen claims that distinctions between his three divisions may be less intrinsic than in style, purpose, and history, we feel recognition these differences can be an important benefit to the community liberal arts colleges, where practicalities dictate that all three divisions the mathematical sciences be housed in a single department. In particular, a broadened view the mathematical sciences can energize a mathematics department by increasing enrollments, the number majors, the number students going on to graduate school, and the general level enthusiasm for studying the mathematical sciences. Below we outline some the essential differences between statistics and core mathematics and discuss some practical curricular implications that these differences have for a mathematics department at a liberal arts college. We concentrate on statistics rather than applied mathematics because we are statisticians. Statistics is underrepresented among mathematics faculty at liberal arts colleges in the United States. A recent survey [8] mathematics departments at liberal arts colleges suggests that approximately half all such departments have no one with an advanced degree in statistics and only 12.5% have more than one such person. And, unlike the situation at many universities, if statisticians are employed at liberal arts colleges they will generally be housed in the department mathematics, since mathematics is the traditional liberal arts discipline most closely aligned with statistics. Because the responsibility statistics education at most liberal arts colleges rests with the mathematics department, it is imperative that the department recognize the fundamental differences between statistics and core mathematics and ensure that their statistics curriculum reflects these differences. Core mathematics and statistics differ in two fundamental ways. Both fields look for structure and patterns, but core mathematics looks in the abstract arena space and number while statistics looks at data from other, nonmathematical subject areas. Hence core mathematics and statistics differ in their objects study. They also differ in their methods. The emphasis in mathematical thinking is on deduction. For example, the axioms classical group theory form a framework from which theorems can be derived. Naturally, in the discovery new truths inductive reasoning and exploration are essential tools. In developing a new

This study explored a career planning course at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities’ College of Liberal Arts. The course aimed to improve students’ career readiness through reflections about their liberal arts education. Individual interviews explored how the course affected students’ ability to articulate the value of their education to potential employers. The authors found that students learned how to articulate career competencies and developed an understanding of what a liberal arts education entails and how it aligns with career readiness. Implications for career development practice are highlighted.

In this article, we reflect on the critical role of liberal arts education in fostering creative, collaborative, and ethical innovators for pervasive computing. We discuss why liberal arts education is important as a foundation for advanced studies and leadership in ubiquitous computing, and we share our experiences teaching pervasive computing in liberal arts colleges.