As with other commenters, I think the premise here is flawed.

I teach at a public liberal arts college which is typical of many. (Certainly our curriculum and requirements are in line with other schools in the COPLAC Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges.)

Our students are required to complete 120 credits to graduate, which over four years averages to 15 credits a semester, or five 3-credit courses. I don't believe there is any serious difference in student course load when compared to large research universities (but maybe someone will prove me wrong).

The main distinction about teaching at a liberal arts college is that the overall curriculum is broader, and students do not focus on specialization as much as integration of diverse subject areas. Instead of taking 70 or 80 credits of (say) computer science, our students take only 40-45, with the other two-thirds of their degree consisting of courses in other areas. In this way, students build a broad, integrated perspective which incorporates their major into a study of the world at large. The focus at liberal arts colleges is to help students become better critical thinkers, decision makers, and problem solvers, rather than becoming subject matter experts in a narrow discipline.

Differences in student load at liberal arts colleges vs. research universities
I've mainly used Photoshop before and only just picked up Illustrator a few days ago. Anyway, I used Illustrator to create lots of images (with transparent backgrounds) of different letters, each one filled with circles. More to the point, upon exporting as a .PNG, I noticed a resolution option. Me being the little derp that I am, I figured a larger resolution is always better, so I set this to high (300 ppi).

Upon importing the images into my project however, I realized that the images had become a lot larger than they should be. Upon tweaking the export resolution setting, I noticed that if I set this to low (72 ppi), the images come out as the expected size. I was just wondering how I should expect this to effect my drawings. If I were to keep the high resolution images I exported at 300 ppi, am I always going to be forced to reduce their size afterwards by a certain amount? Otherwise, should I always stick to  72 ppi in order to keep the size of the image the same and to avoid needing to re-size things later?

Image quality is not so important in this case, so there probably isn't much reason for me to use anything higher than 72 ppi anyway. Just for the sake of learning however, I thought this would be a good question to ask.
