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The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness and outcomes of liberal arts in preparing people for adult roles.

Review of research and opinions about the liberal arts.

Liberal-arts outcomes results have fallen short of expectations though this may be a short coming of higher education generally. A new era of the knowledge society will shrink liberal-arts departments in humanities, literature and philosophy.

Liberal arts need definition and clarity of expected outcomes.

Jobs in liberal arts colleges will decrease given its weak effectiveness. Online education for liberal-arts areas will grow explosively.

Liberal-arts critics have been active for decades. What is different today is world wide access to all information 24/7 and massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Liberal arts colleges (LACs) have played a crucial role in the foundation and development of the US higher education system. Today, these schools face numerous organizational and environmental challenges that threaten their performance and even survival. This paper aims to examine whether Senge’s (1990) vision of the learning organization can serve a useful function in responding to these challenges.

A conceptual analysis was conducted based on research relating to learning organizations, LACs and the liberal arts tradition.

The paper identifies significant congruence between learning organization and liberal arts/liberal learning principles. LACs may benefit from applying and modifying Senge’s (1990) framework to their own unique situations.

While The Fifth Discipline has certainly contributed to the lexicon of higher education, the role that Senge’s (1990) framework plays in LACs has received scant research attention. This paper investigates the applicability of Senge’s approach to an underexplored context.

This research evaluates the support for eight liberal arts goals: thinking clearly; knowing the physical universe; cultural awareness; moral awareness; valuing thought; thought/feeling relationships; independent action; and tolerance and concern for others. (1) The survey of 1,014 consists of 541 graduates and 473 undergraduates of a small southern liberal arts university. A low response rate for graduates led to comparisons of returns to the original sample frame in terms of: year graduated, sex composition, and ratings by survey return date. (2) the GER scale consists of 8 subscales and 33 items. Each item is rated by importance and gains in college. Cronbach's Alpha for subscales ranged from .67 to .82 with an overall ∝ =.928. (3) Results. All goals were rated as Very Important to Extremely Important. GER goals were rated more important by undergraduates who were: women, leaders, community volunteers, and those with out‐of‐class experience. Tolerance and Concern for Others was the most important goal. Greatest gains were in thinking clearly. Support of the liberal arts program, defined as a combination of gains and importance, increased from freshman to senior class. Support was unexpectedly strong for more affective components of the program. Limitations of this research are used to suggest future areas of study.

Develops a model which links organizational growth and decline to competitive strategy, the strategy‐making process and the personal characteristics of the chief executive officer. The model was empirically tested for private liberal art colleges where the size of the student enrolment is a dominant factor for the vitality of the institution. The major findings of the study are: enrolment growth is associated with focused strategy, the CEO innovative style, differentiation and assertive strategy‐making process; and the major discriminating factors between institutions experiencing enrolment growth and institutions experiencing enrolment decline are focused strategy and the CEO innovator cognitive style. Discusses and examines the policy implications of the study.

Ruth Brandon looks at the Liberal Arts courses in the United States and reveals where our own James Commission found some of its ideas.

Financial struggles affecting universities across the United States have caused debate about whether business schools are cost prohibitive or cost savvy, especially for small liberal arts universities that lack large endowments and are highly dependent upon student enrolment. In other words, are they too expensive for small schools to operate? The presence of a business school necessitates hiring business faculty with comparatively high salary expectations.

This paper analyses the cost effectiveness of business schools at four small liberal arts universities.

Our results show that cost is most strongly correlated with class size and adjunct instruction as opposed to faculty salaries.

Thus, class size and the implementation of adjunct instruction can make having a business school not only affordable but also advantageous.

Business schools offer a way for universities with missions centred around developing the whole person through a liberal arts education to remain a going concern in such a volatile climate.

This paper uses proprietary data to analyse the cost of faculty in different disciplines.

In College Learning for the New Global Century, the National Leadership Council of Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) argue for a liberal education for all students because “(i)n an economy fueled by innovation, the capabilities developed through a liberal education have become America’s most valuable economic asset.” (LEAP, 2007). The Business for a Better World Center and the School of Business at George Mason University endorse this view and have applied the liberal education approach to the study of business. This paper aims to explore the current environment of business education, the role of liberal education and the school’s programs and their benefits.

This paper relies on a case-study approach.

In this paper, the authors explore how George Mason University’s School of Business brings a liberal education approach to business education and draws on a combination of high impact practices, such as first-year seminars, common intellectual experiences, learning communities, collaborative assignments, undergraduate research, community-based learning, internships, capstone courses and projects and diversity and global learning (Kuh, 2008). Mason’s experience demonstrates the feasibility and benefits of this integration.

This case study provides unique insight into how business schools can integrate a liberal education approach into business education with successful results. As such, the paper contributes to the growing body of research on the benefits of liberal arts and business education models as a means of addressing global goals and provides a valuable case study to understand better the necessity of integrative, interdisciplinary learning.

The decade of the 1980s was unique for the sheer quantity of education reform reports and legislation. Virtually every state enacted education reform legislation, including reforms of teacher education, licensing, and comprehension. According to Darling‐Hammond and Berry, over 1,000 pieces of legislation related to teachers have been drafted since 1980, and “a substantial fraction have been implemented.” As I discussed in my 1989 RSR article, “Five Years after A Nation at Risk: An Annotated Bibliography,” two waves of 1980s reform reports were identified in the enormous body of primary and secondary literature dealing with education reform. The reform publications of the early 1980s stressed improvements in curricular standards, student performance outcomes, and changes to the education programs, such as salary increases, teacher testing, and stricter certification requirements. The second‐wave reform publications emphasized more complex issues centered around the concepts of restructuring the schools and teacher education programs, as well as empowering teachers to become more involved in curriculum and governance issues.

More than any other area of academic library collection, periodicals demonstrate the immense gap between the infinite nature of human inquiry and the finite quality of the resources available for the acquisition, organization, and maintenance of this inquiry. The number of periodicals currently available is far beyond the capabilities of most academic libraries to acquire and maintain. For example, Katz and Katz wrote in their introduction to the most recent edition of Magazines for Libraries that they included some 6,500 periodicals from over 65,000 possibilities. Fewer than a half a dozen major research libraries subscribe to 65,000 or more periodicals, and only a similar number of liberal arts college libraries subscribe to even 3,000 titles.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how liberal higher education can strengthen vocational higher education.

The paper uses Shay's (2013) framework of curriculum differentiation to articulate how the strengths and shortcomings of liberal education differ from those of vocational education and to allow the differences highlighted to inform a resolution to each other's shortcomings.

There is nothing new in the findings that liberal education differs from vocational education and that both have shortcomings. What the paper presents is a viewpoint that the differences are not confirmation that these two approaches to education are in opposition but rather that they complement each other. The strength of one is the weakness of the other.

The perspective taken in this paper is developed using the language of semantic density (SD) and semantic gravity (SG). Using Shay's semantic field of recontextualized knowledge, this paper suggests that liberal and vocational education inhabit two sides of contexts and concepts continua. The paper further proposes that both are alike in a meaningful way because both have unsuccessfully managed the role of context in their curricula.