What's the difference between a college with a liberal arts education and a liberal arts college?

[ucbalumnus]

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@intparent

Interesting you should give Mudd as an example. My D is a freshman there, and she has to write a paper this semester on whether Mudd is or isn’t a liberal arts college. Honestly… my vote after watching and listening to her first semester is “not really”. They take a full load of tech courses, and tack one non-tech course on each semester (essentially overloading them compared to every other college out there – 17.5 credits is a normal freshman load each semester). And she says her peers know very little about art, literature, poetry, history, etc – she still likes it a lot and has good friends, but the LAC label doesn’t seem very accurate.

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<p>Math and science are parts of the liberal arts. Harvey Mudd College does require all students to complete at least 11 humanities and social studies courses as well as a math and science core curriculum.</p>

<p>However, 35% of recent graduates are engineering majors, not normally considered a liberal arts major. If there is a threshold of percentage of students in liberal arts majors versus other majors which contributes to determining whether a school is a liberal arts college, then Harvey Mudd College might fall short there.</p>