page_title: Liberal arts college
section_title: Distinguishing characteristics
hierarchical_section_title: Liberal arts college / Distinguishing characteristics
caption_attribution_description: English: A class of the Integrated Studies 5 senior seminar at Shimer College in 1994, facilitated by Don Moon and Eileen Buchanan. The participants have copies of the New Oxford Annotated Bible (red) and Mary Barnard's translation of Sappho. Published in 1995 Shimer catalog. Shimer College was then located in Waukegan, Illinois, and the room shown was on the first floor of the main classroom building at 438 N. Sheridan Road in Waukegan.
context_page_description: A liberal arts college or liberal arts institution of higher education is a college with an emphasis on undergraduate study in the liberal arts and sciences. Such colleges aim to impart a broad general knowledge and develop general intellectual capacities, in contrast to a professional, vocational, or technical curriculum. Students in a liberal arts college generally major in a particular discipline while receiving exposure to a wide range of academic subjects, including sciences as well as the traditional humanities subjects taught as liberal arts. Although it draws on European antecedents, the liberal arts college is strongly associated with American higher education, and most liberal arts colleges around the world draw explicitly on the American model.
  According to U.S. News & World Report, the top ten ranked Liberal Arts Colleges in America for 2019, by alphabetical order are: Amherst College, Bowdoin College, Carleton College, Claremont McKenna College, Davidson College, Middlebury College, Pomona College, Swarthmore College, Wellesley College, and Williams College.
context_section_description: Liberal arts colleges are distinguished from other types of higher education chiefly by their generalist curricula and small size. These attributes have various secondary effects in terms of administration as well as student experience. For example, class size is usually much lower at liberal arts colleges than at universities, and faculty at liberal arts colleges typically focus on teaching more than research.
  From a student perspective, a liberal arts college typically differs from other forms of higher education in the following areas: higher overall student satisfaction, a general feeling that professors take a personal interest in the student's education, and perception of encouragement to participate in discussion. Many students select liberal arts colleges with precisely this sense of personal connection in mind.
  From an administrative standpoint, the small size of liberal arts colleges contributes to their cohesion and ability to survive through difficult times. Job satisfaction is also typically higher in liberal arts colleges, for both faculty and staff. The smaller size also makes it feasible for liberal arts colleges to adopt relatively experimental or divergent approaches, such as the Great Books curriculum at St. John's or Shimer, or the radically interdisciplinary curriculum of Marlboro.
  In addition, most liberal arts colleges are primarily residential, which means students live and learn away from home, often for the first time.
  The distinctiveness of these attributes is somewhat eroded by the tendency of universities to adopt aspects of the liberal arts college, and vice versa.  For example, several American universities, including the University of California system, have experimented with a cluster colleges model in which small liberal-arts-college-like units within a larger university form a "honeycomb of residential colleges".  In addition, some universities have maintained a sub-unit that preserves many aspects of the liberal arts college, such as Columbia College within Columbia University.
  Liberal arts colleges themselves sometimes cluster to offer greater curricular breadth or share other resources (for instance Colgate University and Hamilton College in New York allow cross enrollment).
caption: Discussion class at Shimer College in Chicago
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