In this article, Lori Varlotta, president of small liberal arts institution Hiram College, describes how she and her team have launched a systemic change process that includes modifying the entire academic structure: first-year experience, majors, core curriculum, graduation requirements, and student learning outcomes. Hiram's model for academic…

Clay Christensen predicted half of colleges and universities would go bankrupt or close within a decade. Each year brings more financial trouble: a quarter of all private nonprofit institutions experienced deficits in 2017. More than two-thirds (68 percent) of financial officers at four-year private colleges reported their tuition discount rate…

Our current higher education institutional structures have become so ingrained that many of these structures have gone unquestioned for more than a century. While it is true that we have created, to a significant degree, new "functions" for higher education, many of our "structures" endure. Two major disruptors--the influence…

For much of the past century, scholars have questioned the viability and sustainability of liberal arts colleges, and empirical research suggests that the number of liberal arts colleges has declined in recent decades. In one study, of 212 colleges identified as liberal arts colleges in 1990, only 130 continued to serve primarily a nonprofessional…

As a veteran university president of fifteen years, MaryAnn Baenninger has welcomed thousands of prospective students and parents to Saturday recruitment days, however recently she has begun to wonder about the adequacy of recent descriptions of "liberal arts" as an ideal education. National conversations about higher education have…

In this article, Brian Rosenberg observes that innumerable things have changed inside and outside academia since 1944, but the essential conservatism of the academy has not. When it comes to examining their own practices and assumptions, colleges and universities tend to be highly resistant to change and powerfully attached to whatever their…

Despite generations of evidence that a liberal education is one of the most powerful engines of progress, for individuals and for our society, there is growing dismissal and even distrust of what liberal arts colleges do. Recent survey data from the American Council on Education show that the public's perception of the value and quality of a…

Just over fifty years ago, the author began his senior year on the bucolic campus of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. By the time of his graduation in 1969, he had been affiliated with the university for seven years, having studied cello there since the age of fourteen. Yet this familiarity did little to quell the profound alienation that he felt…

Few subjects have suffered as much as the liberal arts from the power of stale rhetoric, hollow appeals to tradition, and journalistic misrepresentation. Leon Botstein, begins this article by saying that together, these three factors have generated and legitimated public skepticism about the liberal arts. A liberal arts education (which is rarely…

Nancy Cantor is chancellor of Rutgers University-Newark. This article was adapted from Cantor's address at "The Power of Civic Engagement--Across Campus, Within Communities, Beyond Borders," the premeeting symposium at the 2018 annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Cantor contemplates the power of civic…

In this article, Jose Antonio Bowen, president of Goucher College, writes that a new technological society inclusive of all students and graduates, a new model of education geared toward the learning economy, where more--maybe even most--content learning takes place after graduation may be required. Bowen believes that in order to prepare students…

Countless mothers and fathers have left behind familiar landscapes, beloved family and friends, and the comfort of certainty to give their children lives better than their own. It is no coincidence that many of these parents chose as their new home the United States of America, a country founded on the promise of public education. The proud home…

There is nothing new about attacks on college and university faculty for what is deemed unacceptable political expression. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) was founded more than one hundred years ago in response to exactly these kinds of attacks. This article discusses good and bad examples of responses to the targeted…

Soon after the Great Recession of 2008 hit this manufacturing stalwart of the upper Midwest, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker began proclaiming that the skills gap--the idea that plenty of well-paying jobs existed, but the educational system was failing to provide employers with skilled workers--was the primary cause of high unemployment and a…

Providing effective leadership and mentorship to students often requires an understanding of power systems and a focus on amplifying marginalized voices. The author, who identifies as a queer white woman, in her years as a graduate student, has found that attention to voice is essential, but also messy. As Donna M. Lanclos reminds,…