From a reader who points out that the best liberal arts educations are often to be found at smaller colleges rather than at large research universities:

As a graduate of both a largish research University (UC Santa Cruz) and a small liberal arts college (St. John's College, Annapolis), I can't tell you how much better my experience was at the liberal arts school. St. John's is, of course, quite different from most liberal arts colleges, but ... I've gotten to know some other schools as well and I have found that the intellectual climate at theÝaverage liberal arts school (e.g., Wabash, Dickinson, U. Dallas, St. Olaf, Thomas Aquinas, Lewis & Clark, etc.) is simply more conducive to learning. These schools don't offer nearly the range of courses that a student would find at Ohio State or Brown, but that often turns out to be a positive boon, because students can't fulfill their "Citizenship" requirement on courses like "Post-Colonial American Empire." Some of them, like St. John's, U. Dallas and Thomas Aquinas College, don't even give their students the oportunity to choose how to fulfill their distribution requirements, thus forcing them to getÝa literary culture from their "Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Hobbes, and Bishop Berkeley." Their graduates are often admitted to the best graduate programs in every discipline including the sciences despite the fact that they rarely have elaborate science labs.Ý

The basic truth that these colleges have grasped is that 18 year-olds rarely have a good idea of what they want to do with their lives, nor are they generally competent to decide what they should learn if they are to become truly educated adults. In the big universities they are led toÝbelieve that taking one or two classes from a list of 30 suffices to ensure they haveÝthe breadth of learning that is expected of a liberally educated individual, but that is rarely case. When I was at UC Santa Cruz, I tried as best I could to cobble together a liberal education, but still never managed to read Chaucer, Virgil or anything written originally in Greek, and I majored in Literature!

Another advantage to the small liberal arts college is that faculty are less often judged by their publications than by their ability to impart knowledge to the young. I know senior faculty at St. John's with Curriculum Vitae that are shorter than those of many Ph.D. candidates, but because the institution is focused on undergraduate education, nobody in the administration cares that they don't publish. Too often in the big research universities, undergraduates are taught by grad students or adjunct faculty--that is rarely the case in the liberal arts colleges. Also, the schools are generally not big enough to hold classes for more than 20-30 students at a time, another downfall of our large universities.