<p>A liberal arts college traditionally is a small school that trains students in general education and focuses on developing thought processes and intellectual ability. It does not offer programs in professional skills, and it does not usually have graduate schools attached that offer professional training (some LACs do have small graduate school programs, but not at the scale of a university). So a research university may have a medical school or a law school attached to it, as well as several undergraduate colleges that make up the university (college of arts, college of science, etc.). </p>
<p>A Liberal Arts college is a standalone institution, and again, it does not offer professional training. You cannot become an accountant, a nurse, a dentist, etc. at an LAC. At my LAC, we could take classes at a nearby university for free, but if we took an accounting class or any other class deemed to be “professional” we would not receive credit for that class. </p>
<p>Liberal arts also refers to a kind of curriculum that emphasizes providing students with a general basis of knowledge that is supposed to be universally applicable to whatever they decide to go on to do. The idea being that if you know how to think, and you know a little about every major discipline, then you can specialize in whatever you want and still be on solid footing. The modern liberal arts are: literature, languages, philosophy, history, mathematics and science. </p>
<p>In classical antiquity, liberal arts denoted the difference between the education of a slave and the education of a free person. A slave only needed technical knowledge, a free person had reason to have a wider education. Classical liberal arts were: astronomy, grammar, dialectic, arithmetic, rhetoric, geometry, and music.</p>