ADRIAN, Mich. (AP) They're the places you think of when you think of "college" leafy campuses, small classes, small towns.
Liberal arts colleges
are where students ponder life's big questions, and learn to think en
route to successful careers and richer lives, if not always to the
best-paying first jobs. But today's increasingly career-focused students mostly aren't buying the idea that a
liberal arts education is good value, and many small liberal arts colleges are struggling. The survivors are shedding their
liberal arts
identity, if not the label. A study published earlier this year found
that of 212 such institutions identified in 1990, only 130 still meet
the criteria of a "true liberal arts college." Most that fell off the
list remained in business, but had shifted toward a pre-professional
curriculum.
These distinctively American
institutions — educating at most 2 percent of college students but
punching far above their weight in accomplished graduates — can't turn
back the clock. But schools like Adrian College, 75 miles southwest of Detroit and back from a recent near-death experience, offer something of a playbook. First, get students in the door
by offering what they do want, namely sports and extracurricular
opportunities that might elude them at bigger schools. Offer vocational
subjects like business, criminal justice and exercise science that
students and parents think rightly or wrongly will lead to better
jobs.
Then, once they're enrolled, look for other ways to sprinkle the liberal arts magic these colleges still believe in, even if it requires a growing stretch to call yourself a liberal arts college. "We're liberal arts-aholics," says Adrian President Jeffrey Docking,
who has added seven sports and two pre-professional degree programs
since arriving in 2005 — and nearly doubled enrollment to about 1,750.
But he's also a realist.
"I say this with regret," said
Docking, an ethicist by training. But "you really take your life into
your own hands thinking that a pure liberal arts degree is going to be
attractive enough to enough 18-year-olds that you fill your freshman
classes."
In ancient Greece, liberal arts
were the subjects that men free from work were at leisure to pursue.
Today, the squishy definition still includes subjects that don't prepare
for a particular job (but can be useful for many). English, history,
philosophy, and other arts and sciences are the traditional mainstays.
But these days, some prefer a more, well, liberal definition that's more
about teaching style than subject matter.
"I refer to it as learning on a
human scale," said William Spellman, a University of North
Carolina-Asheville historian who directs a group of 27 public liberal arts colleges.
"It's about small classes, access to faculty, the old tutorial model of
being connected with somebody who's not interested only in their
disciplinary area but culture broadly defined."
Does it work? It's true that
research tying college majors to salaries can make the generic liberal
arts degrees look unappealing. But technical training can become
obsolete, and students are likely to change careers several times. These
schools argue you're better off, both in life and work, simply learning
to think.
Research does point to broader
benefits of studying liberal arts in small settings, in areas like
leadership, lifelong learning and civic engagement. Liberal arts
colleges are proven launching pads to the top of business, government
and academia (graduating 12 U.S. presidents, six chief justices and 12
of 53 Nobel laureates over a recent decade who attended American
colleges, by one researcher's count). Foreign delegations often visit to
observe, and big U.S. universities are trying to recreate mini-liberal
arts colleges within their campuses.
But outside a secure tier of
elites with 10-figure endowments — the Swarthmores, Amhersts, Wellesleys
of the world — many schools are in trouble. The liberal arts still
account for about one-third of bachelor's degrees, but the experience of
getting one in these small settings is increasingly atypical.
Definitions vary, but liberal arts colleges today probably account for
between 100,000 and 300,000 of the country's roughly 17 million
undergraduates. There are more students at the University of Phoenix,
alone.
These schools "are all getting to
around $40,000 a year, in some cases $50,000, and students and their
families are just saying 'we can't do it,'" Docking said. Small classes
make these schools among them most expensive places in higher education,
though they often offer discounts to fill seats (Adrian's list price is
$38,602, including room and board, but the average student pays
$19,000).
Other pressures are geographic
and generational. Many liberal arts colleges are clustered in the
Northeast and Midwest, in towns like Adrian, founded by optimistic 18th-
and 19th-century settlers who started colleges practically as soon as
they arrived. But where the country is growing now is the South and
West, where the private college tradition isn't as deep. Meanwhile, students these days
expect the climbing walls and high-end dorms that smaller, poorer
schools can't afford. And a growing proportion of college students are
the first generation in their family to attend. They've proved a tougher
sell on the idea they can afford to spend four years of college
"exploring." In UCLA's massive national survey of college freshman,
"getting a better job" recently surpassed "learning about things that
interest me" as the top reason for going to college. The percentage
calling job preparation a very important reason rose to 86 percent, up
from 70 percent in 2006, before the economy tanked.
Politicians have reinforced the message. Florida Republican Gov. Rick
Scott recently proposed public colleges charge more for degrees in
subjects like anthropology that he said were less economically valuable
to the state than science and engineering (though in fact, those
subjects usually cost much more to teach).
So, with varying reluctance,
colleges have adjusted. In his 2011 book "Liberal Arts at the Brink,"
former Beloit College president Victor Ferrall calculated that in
1986-87, just 30 of 225 liberal arts colleges awarded 30 percent or more
of their degrees in vocational subjects. By 2007-2008, 118 did so. Even
at a consortium called the Annapolis Group, comprised of the supposedly
purest liberal arts colleges, the percentage of vocational degrees
jumped from 6 percent to 17 percent.
"What's new in the past few
years," said Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent
Colleges, "is people are beginning to wonder in the places that have
remained liberal arts colleges whether that's enough." Schools like
Adrian that had already shifted to a more vocational approach "are
asking whether the balance is right, whether they need to tip more to
the professional side." Adrian was weed-strewn, demoralized and down to its last 840 students when Docking arrived in 2005.
"We borrowed 30 million bucks and said, 'if this doesn't work out, we're done,'" he recalled. First, Docking built up
facilities and added teams, notably in sports like hockey and lacrosse
that tilt toward more affluent students. No niche market was too small:
Adrian started one of the country's only synchronized skating teams. At
the nearby University of Michigan, almost nobody walks onto the football
team or even the marching band, but you can at Adrian. And everybody
recruits. Docking's band director has to bring in 20 kids a year, the
symphony director 10. He has fired coaches who don't meet their quotas. (This year, about 700 of Adrian's
1,756 students play varsity sports, more than 40 percent. At the
University of Michigan, there are 881 student-athletes — or 3 percent of
the 27,500 undergraduates.)
Docking worried Adrian would
become a "jock factory," and the number of students wearing team gear on
campus is striking. But, he said: "They come in as hockey players, and
they leave as chemists and journalists and business leaders." Michael
Allen, a longtime theater professor, says the athletics culture has
turned out better than he feared, saying most athletes who persist are
(or get) serious academically.
Pre-professional programs weren't
new to Adrian, but it's recently added athletic training and sports
management. The two most popular majors are business and exercise
science. So is Adrian still a "liberal arts college?"
Some would scoff, but Docking say yes. He notes the top minors include
chemistry, English and religion/philosophy. He talks up "institutes" on
campus — devoted to ethics, study abroad and other areas — that try to
inject liberal arts-style learning around even the pre-professional
curriculum. That curriculum still includes liberal arts distribution
requirements majors, and he insists liberal arts skills can be taught in
other types of classes, and even through extra-curriculars.
Vicki Baker, a professor at
nearby Albion College, who co-authored the recent study tracking the 39
percent decline in liberal arts colleges since 1990, also thinks these
colleges can retain their value even as they evolve. Her Albion business
classes include debates, presentations and other teaching techniques
that were impossible when she taught 400 at Penn State.
Liberal arts colleges
"appeal to a certain kind of student who really flourishes in that
environment," and who might not otherwise succeed in college, Baker
said. "It would be a loss to see that vanish." Senior Kyle Cordova chose Adrian
half for the chance to play baseball, half for its small size. He was
leaning toward a liberal arts major but ended up in criminal justice to
prepare for a law enforcement career. He's had the same half-dozen or so
professors year after year. "They know me, they know how I work, what
I'm weak in, what I'm strong in, how to help me better," he said.
"That's better than going to Michigan State."
Communications major Garrett
Beitelschies said his professors meet with him on every paper and
"you're actually talking in front of the room, having to defend your
stance." He's also partaken of an extracurricular feast unimaginable at
the bigger schools he considered: president of his fraternity and the
senior class, radio, theater, homecoming king and even dressing up as
Bruiser the Bulldog mascot at football games. With financial aid Adrian
ended up costing him less than some state schools.
Both students said they'd learned broader skills — Cordova cited the complex skills involved in learning to interview witnesses.
But neither said they'd taken a class where the syllabus entailed reading, say, a set of novels. Liberal arts colleges talk
constantly — and perhaps with more urgency lately — about better
pitching their case to the public. But until they do, they'll have to
respond to what that public wants. Docking says the survival recipe
will vary (hockey helps here but won't in for Florida colleges). But the
basic formula is the same.
"You need to be able to offer
more than simply strong academics or you're going to have difficulty
attracting students," he said. "There's a lot of competition. You'd
better have something to distinguish yourself."
Crystal Harris 
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