What Is a Liberal Education, and What’s It for? A review AAC&U’s 2020 Report “What Liberal Education Looks Like”

Last week, the New York Times published an opinion piece, “Harvard or Happiness? 11 High School Seniors Debate College Rankings.” In one key moment, Morin and Mandy (high-school seniors from Indiana and New York), give advice to high school students: research your colleges, and do it early. The advice is sound enough, but when it comes to researching liberal-arts schools, we would need to know: just what is a liberal-arts education???

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The question is far from settled or simple. In the news and social-media feeds, the liberal arts are often and erroneously conflated with progressive (even socialist) politics and impractical, self-absorbed coursework that leads to debt and dead-end jobs.??

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The criticism is so misguided and acerbic that Lynn Pasquerella (president of Association of American Colleges & Universities) warns of a “prevailing national rhetoric … call[ing] into question the value of higher education, in general, and liberal education, in particular” and the need to “restor[e] public trust in the promise of liberal education and inclusive excellence” (2).?

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The 2020 report from the (AAC&U, “What Liberal Education Looks Like: What It Is, Who It’s For, & Where It Happens” provides a reminder of what a liberal education is, but also gives an aspirational vision for what liberal education should be: a public good providing intellectual development, civic engagement, economic advancement, equity, and social mobility.?

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So what is a liberal education? It includes coursework teaching “knowledge of human cultures and the physical and natural world,” including the humanities (literature, philosophy, history and so forth), the social sciences (psychology, economics, anthropology and so on) and the natural sciences (biology, chemistry, physics, math and the like) (9). Given this definition, the report identifies a liberal education as the focus of a liberal-arts college, but also a foundational part of general-education coursework in business, engineering, architecture, and vocational schools.?

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What is a liberal education for? The report points out that the term stems from the word liberation, or “free[dom of] the mind to seek the truth unencumbered by dogma, ideology, or preconceived notions” (7). Moreover, as the opposite of illiberal education, it works against “indoctrination, rote and purely instrumental learning, unquestioned transmission of a closed system of thought” (8).?

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How should a liberal education be taught? The report is aspirational rather than descriptive, citing what institutions should strive to do, rather than what they necessarily achieve: “through its emphasis on synthesis and advanced accomplishment across general and specialized studies, liberal education promotes integrative learning, requiring that students develop and demonstrate the ability to apply knowledge and skills to complex problems and in varied settings” (9).?

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To achieve these ends, a liberal education should incorporate high-impact practices (i.e., first-year seminars, learning communities, undergraduate research, service-learning, study abroad, and internships), mentorship, and a self-directed capstone project that culminates in a holistic learning experience. Special attention is given to the ePortfolio, an “ongoing curation” of a student’s work that showcases work and prompts the student to reflect and “make sense of his or her cumulative experience” (19-20).?

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While the report casts liberal education as an approach essential to all forms of higher education, its aims are even broader: liberal education is necessary to the civic and economic health of the nation and world. As an engine of democracy, liberal education provides skills of “discern[ing] truth, speak[ing] across differences and engag[ing] in deliberation” to counter “increasing polarization and partisanship across the country and around the world” (2). Economically, it “position[s] students for success in a future none of us can fully predict” (2), a point elaborated in AAC&U’s 2018 report “Fulfilling the American Dream: Liberal Education and the Future of Work.”?

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The report most powerfully asserts the public importance of liberal education in pointing out how civic and economic purposes interconnect. It writes that a liberal education fosters social mobility. When it emphasizes inclusion, it “takes direct aim at educational disparities and patterns of systematic disadvantage,” and in so doing “unleashes the potential of those otherwise most likely to be excluded from full participation in civic and economic life” (6).?

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For high-school seniors like Morin and Mandy in the New York Times article, researching universities is a crucial step in the application process. So too is knowing what college is for. For the eleven students interviewed, college is a “ticket to better internships and jobs” as well as “happiness.” For thousands of students across the country like them who are applying to college and making difficult decisions in the coming months, they can rest assured that a liberal-arts college provides a pathway not just to making a living, but also to creating a life worth living.??