The "Economic Crisis" in the Liberal Arts College
Abstract
While this paper will have relevance to other institutions,
it is arbitrarily limited to 699 four year
institutions offering a "liberal" or "general" education. Information from the Council for the Advancement
of Small Colleges (CASC) is frequently used.
Having been excluded from a 1955 Ford grant for improving
faculty salaries, fifty-three unaccredited colleges formed
CASC in 1956 to provide themselves with the means of reaching
certain mutual goals such as accreditation. After ten
years of service to some hundred and twenty schools, CASC membership currently consists of eighty-one institutions,
many of which are now accredited. Their average student
body numbers six hundred and the mean cost per resident
student is $1,600 per year. In viewing data
from the CASC colleges, one should keep in mind the conclusions
that apply to them as a group do not necessarily
reflect the situation in every liberal arts college or even
in every CASC college. CASC is used as a sample of some of
the problems of efficient resource allocation faced to a greater or lesser extent by all liberal arts colleges. In
the opinion of CASC's Executive Director, Alfred T. Hill,
there are between three and four hundred liberal arts colleges
not very different from the CASC colleges.