Liberal arts college

A liberal arts college is an institution found in the United States

offering primarily or exclusively bachelor's degrees in a program

designed to be completed in four years' worth of study and offering a more

uniform experience across the student body than might be found at a larger

university setting with more diffuse offerings.

The term "liberal" in "liberal arts" originally meant "appropriate for free

men," i.e., those citizens of the republics of classical antiquity and a

generalized education thought to be most proper for these social and

political elites. As such, the course of study in the "liberal arts" was

almost entirely devoted to the classics while shunning most

training directly applicable for a given trade or pursuit.

Later, the "liberal arts" broadened to encompass study in the humanities

more generally. Liberal arts colleges are still typified by their rejection

of more direct vocational training, with graduates often leaving to pursue

more specialized training at other institutions, such as professional (ie,

business, law, medicine) or graduate schools.

Today, the liberal arts are sometimes, e.g., in college course catalogs,

treated as "liberal" in the sense of being liberating of the mind,

removing prejudices and unjustified assumptions; this, in spite of the etymology, is treated by some as the central meaning of the term.

Some institutions referred to as "liberal arts colleges" are distinguished

from universities not so much by a difference in kind, but a difference in

size, taking the form of small universities, complete with subsidiary

schools dedicated to a particular specialized course of study and offering a

limited set of graduate degrees. In this sense, large liberal arts colleges

and small private universities share occupy similar niches.

Liberal arts colleges retain a measure of elitism in a few ways.

Most such colleges are funded privately and so take a large

portion of their operating revenue directly from tuition, making

such education more expensive than an education from a

taxpayer-subsidized community college, public university,

or land grant university. Many also aspire to selective

admissions procedures, the least controversial of which may be

based on the academic and extra-curricular achievements of

applicants during their high-school studies, and on standardized

test scores. Because alumni contributions are a valuable

adjunct to tuition, alumni loyalty is also cultivated, and

liberal arts colleges spur such loyalty by giving admissions

preference to "legacies"--ie, the children or close relatives

of past graduates.

/Talk