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.