Checklist for Change: Making American Higher Education a Sustainable Enterprise

Chapter 8: A Liberal Arts Conundrum

126 A Liberal Arts Conundrum 8 In 1994, David Breneman, already a scholarly rarity in that he was both a noted economist focusing on higher education and the past president of a liberal arts college, posed the central question then vexing what had once been the crown jewel of American higher education: Liberal Arts Colleges—Thriving, Surviving, or Endangered? He opened his volume bearing that title with a recitation of the unsettling statistics that had necessarily begged the question. To set the tone Breneman used David Starr Jordon’s 1903 prediction: “as time goes on the college will disappear, in fact if not in name. The best will become universities, the rest will return to their places as academies.” Then Breneman told the story of the numbers: In 1955 liberal arts colleges still accounted for nearly 40 percent of all institutions—732 private colleges . . . enrolled only 7.6 percent of all students. By 1987, the Carnegie Foundation identified 540 out of 3,389 institutions (16 percent) as private liberal arts colleges , with only 4.4 percent of total enrollments. While the apocalyptic vision of the early university presidents did not come to pass, it is hard to argue with the judgment that, by 1990, the small private college had become a much diminished part of the educational landscape. (Breneman 1994, 21) Today that diminishing continues. Liberal arts colleges account for substantially less than 2 percent of all undergraduate enrollments, and, 127 A LIBERAL ARTS CONUNDRUM as Breneman noted nearly two decades ago, liberal arts colleges, in substantial numbers, have survived by becoming something else: comprehensive master’s degree institutions with a growing array of professional programs requiring advanced study and specialization. To better understand how these trends and forces now shape the future of the four-year, residential liberal arts college, one needs to know what they look like today, up close and personal. Although I have spent my career at the University of Pennsylvania, much of my professional and family history reflects a sustaining attachment to liberal arts colleges. I am now a trustee of three such institutions: Franklin and Marshall College (where I have served on the board as both an active and emeritus trustee for nearly thirty years), the Sage Colleges in Troy and Albany, New York, and Whittier College, my own alma mater. Two of my three children attended Carleton College in Minnesota, and I have been a regular visitor, facilitator, and expounder at more than two dozen other liberal arts colleges. All of these institutions are today surviving, to use Breneman’s classification, but nearly all face a tough struggle that is getting tougher. Why? There are various explanations. A really good liberal arts college is an expensive operation—small classes, a constantly expanding knowledge base that somehow needs to be taught, a business model that often requires draconian investments of merit-based student financial aid, and a sense on the part of the students they most want to attract that a small, residential college is too confining. But, as is so often the case, the devil really is in the details. Each institution that I have come to know well has had to face both tough choices and hard times, all the while seeking to remain true to its mission and, at the same time, learning how to become market smart. Among these, the institution I now know best is Whittier College, where I am in my fifth year as a continuing trustee. Whittier College is an interesting amalgam of old ideas, new realities, periods of strong presidential leadership interspersed with a few disastrous choices, and the always looming disruptions of a California economy and political climate that appear to go from bad to worse on a weekly basis. By ancestry, Whittier is a Quaker college founded in 1887. It is Richard Nixon’s alma mater, but it is also the only liberal arts college in America that has been officially designated by the federal government as a Hispanic-Serving Institution. It is residential, neatly nestled in a southern California community whose stock of small, California bungalows gives the town the appearance of a still-intact movie set. As its website makes clear, what the college most likes to boast about, is its sense of itself as a place distinguished “by its small size, pioneering faculty, and nationally recognized curriculum. Facilities rival those at large public institutions, but ours is an intimate...