Personal Attention.
The most respectable liberal arts colleges share many characteristics, including small class sizes, close working relationships with classmates and professors, and an emphasis on developing speaking and writing skills. You won’t find large lecture halls, endless multiple-choice exams, and assistants instead of real professors at a typical liberal arts college, which says a lot about why such colleges are effective and popular.
Variable selectivity
There are more than 200 liberal arts (liberal arts) colleges in the United States, many of which are among the most selective institutions in the country. Institutions such as Swarthmore College, Amherst College, and Williams College enroll only a small percentage of applicants.
There are other good liberal arts colleges that accept about half of all applicants, such as Trinity College in Connecticut, Kenyon College in Ohio, and Grinnell College in Iowa. Other prominent liberal arts colleges have even higher enrollment rates. Depot University in Indiana, Presbyterian College in South Carolina, and Lewis and Clark College in Oregon accept most applicants.
Quality of Education
The best liberal arts institutions attract some of the world’s best-known professors. Whereas at large universities professors must be mainly concerned with publishing scholarly papers, at liberal arts colleges professors may be involved in teaching. In small groups, students’ opinions and thoughts are evaluated. Graduates of such institutions may well say that a liberal arts education has changed their lives for the better.
Hybrid B.A.-B.S. degrees.
It is not uncommon for colleges and universities from a wide range of options to offer a combined degree, where a student earns a B.A. (Bachelor of Arts) degree with an emphasis in the liberal arts curriculum at the same time as a B.S. (Bachelor of Science) degree with an emphasis in disciplines such as engineering. These degrees are usually awarded after five or sometimes six years of study; accelerated four-year programs of study are less common. Also increasingly popular are collaborations between large universities and small liberal arts colleges, where the student takes three or four years and then transfers to a university to continue for a year or two.
One of the most popular of these programs is the Combined Program at Columbia University. After three to four years at a liberal arts college and two years at Columbia University, a student receives a Bachelor of Science and a Bachelor of Arts degree. The most appealing thing about this program is that it guarantees admission to an Ivy League university. If a student meets certain requirements of one of the more than 100 affiliated liberal arts institutions, he or she is guaranteed admission to Columbia’s engineering program. Many of these liberal arts schools are easier to get into than Columbia, which is one reason why this program is so popular.