Academicterror

As the title implies

vossron

Lengthy, but perhaps helpful:

http://www.reed.edu/apply/news_and_a...ficersKnow.pdf

They're sometimes called grad-school-prep colleges.

tk21769

We've had a number of threads on this and related topics in the past year or so. Use the Search function.

Basically, a liberal arts college (LAC) focuses on undergraduate instruction in the humanities, social sciences, biological and physical sciences. They have no (or few) Ph.D. programs, no (or few) pre-professional majors (engineering, architecture, business, nursing), and tend to be small (< 3000 students). There are about 150 of them in the country. The top 50 or so tend to have good to excellent records for placing students into graduate and professional schools.

Students often choose these schools because they offer a more intimate learning environment, with less bureaucracy, smaller classes, and more attention from professors. On the flip side, they can't offer as many courses as a large university; they generally don't have big D1 sports programs; their opportunities for advanced research may be relatively limited.

johnwesley

another way of looking at them is this: almost every privately endowed American university founded before the Civil War began as an LAC; Harvard College, Yale College, Princeton (originally, The College of New Jersey), if you look at the early photographs, they all look not dissimilar to Amherst, Williams, Wesleyan and Hamilton. They prepared the wealthy, for careers in law, medicine, the ministry. And, much later, when college sports became popular they tended to brand themselves as places where, young people could acquire important contacts on and off the playing field. It all tended to be filtered through the haze of ivied walls, storied halls and rugged youth that would later come to epitomize the Ivy League and the Seven Sisters, the majority of which could still be accurately described as rather large LACs as late as 1950.

However, that began to change as America entered its post-WWII period of expansion: scientific knowledge exploded and the corporation became the standard engine of business expansion. And, more people needed educating. LACs could keep up with only a tiny piece of the demands being placed upon them before changing so greatly that they ceased being able to do what they did best, which was connecting eager students with great teachers and -- with each other. So, most of them stayed deliberately small while most of the slack in demand was taken up by Amercia's unparalleled system of state-funded public universities.

Where does that leave them vis a vis other great educational insitutions (i.e., the so -called, research university?) I think some LACs are quite frank about their roles as basically, "preparatory colleges for graduate school" while others still see themselves as performing the important societal function of "producing leaders beyond our numbers" which I think, leaves open the possibility of leading roles in the arts, publishing, education and even -- community organizing.

All are more dependent than ever on satisfying the qualms of a restive middle-class which for several generations, now, have had to take it as an article of faith that four years of training in writing, analytical thinking, and total immersion in comprehensive reading, will somehow lead to that pot of gold under the rainbow: a job. But, I think it is even more complicated than that because anyone can land a job; eventually, everyone does, even in this economy. The important question is whether they will be leading fulfilling lives? A liberal arts education can begin to help to you figure that out.