The Future of the Arts College

Abstract

JT N THE educational circles of America, great concern is being expressed for the future of the traditional four-year college of liberal arts. This institution, which has been the backbone of higher education in the United States for three centuries, the critics now tell us is a sick institution-sick unto death. Strong factors are at work in the field of higher education which are bringing into being a new type of educational organization for the future. Two of these factors which are fatal to the future of the liberal-arts college are: the making of the American university strictly a technical and professional institution, and the rise of the junior college whose major objectives are the completion of general education and the providing of professional training for the university. Thus the traditional liberal-arts college is caught between the upper and the nether millstones. Elsewhere in this issue Mr. Reeves, of the University of Chicago, gives his prediction for the future organization of American higher education. The plan outlined by Mr. Reeves concludes that the liberal-arts program offered by the traditional liberal-arts colleges will no longer be typical of American higher education and that professionalization and specialization will be its key, that there will be more technical and professional training and less strictly cultural and liberal training. In opposition to this view may be presented two facts vitally affecting the future of higher education. First, our system of secondary and higher education is not fully developed. For the United States as a whole we have enrolled in the secondary schools only approximately 53 per cent of the high-school population. The increase has been rapid since i910. In that year the percentage was only i2.66; in I9I5 it was I7.76; and in i920 it was 28.43. One state has now enrolled approximately 75 per cent of the secondary-school population; many of the states have less than 40 per cent. There is considerable expansion yet to be made in the field of secondary education. Where this expansion will reach its maximum no one can predict. The program of higher education is still more undeveloped. Ten per cent of the population beyond high-school age are enrolled in higher institutions, and that percentage has been increasing rapidly in recent years and is still increasing. The percentage was 3.68 in i910, 6.32 in i920, and I0.4I in i926, and no one can predict where it will reach its maximum. Second, the question arises, In what types of education will this expansion occur? A second question, In