Bye bye to liberal arts colleges :-(

Back in 1990, David W. Breneman, an education economist then at the Brookings Institution, stirred debate in higher education by publishing an article titled “Are We Losing Our Liberal Arts Colleges?”

A paper being presented here today at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association looks back at his study and answers his question with an emphatic yes.

It is interesting that Breneman examined this question that long ago. Anyway, the Chronicle report adds:

Mr. Breneman was concerned at the time that many historic liberal-arts colleges were shifting away from their emphasis on the arts and sciences and were instead becoming “professional colleges,” which train a large share of their students to enter fields like business or nursing. He worried that such transformations were diverting the colleges from their traditional missions and undermining the intellectual coherence of their offerings.

In their paper, "Where Are They Now? Revisiting Breneman's Study of Liberal Arts Colleges," the researchers updated Mr. Breneman’s analyses using federal data from the 2006-7 academic year on the degrees that colleges awarded, by discipline. They could not find data on nine institutions that he listed. Of the remaining 203 colleges, 67 were found to offer too many graduate degrees or too many degrees in professional fields to be classified as liberal-arts colleges under his terms. Of those, 37 had drastically changed their missions, with 19 now being classified as comprehensive colleges and 18 as master’s universities. A few others had been subsumed by larger institutions.

BTW, I work at a university that promotes itself as "Providing an academically challenging and unique comprehensive public liberal arts education." The majors with largest enrolments are business, criminal justice, ....