What is Liberal Education?

Liberal education is a philosophy of education that empowers individuals with broad knowledge and transferable skills, and a strong sense of values, ethics, and civic engagement.  These broad goals have been enduring even as the courses and requirements that comprise a liberal education have changed over the years.  Characterized by challenging encounters with important and relevant issues today and throughout history, a liberal education prepares graduates both for socially valued work and for civic leadership in their society. It usually includes a general education curriculum that provides broad exposure to multiple disciplines and ways of knowing, along with more in-depth study in at least one field or area of concentration.

Essential Learning Outcomes

AAC&U's LEAP Campaign has defined a a robust set of "Essential Learning Outcomes" that students develop during an excellent contemporary liberal education. Beginning in school, and continuing at successively higher levels across their college studies, students should prepare for twenty-first-century challenges by gaining all these outcomes.

Often-Confused Terms

Liberal education
A philosophy of education that empowers individuals with broad knowledge and transferable skills, and a strong sense of values, ethics, and civic engagement. Characterized by challenging encounters with important issues, and more a way of studying than specific content, liberal education can occur at all types of colleges and universities. "General Education" and an expectation of in-depth study in at least one field normally comprise liberal education.

Liberal arts
Specific disciplines (the humanities, social sciences, and sciences).

Liberal arts colleges
A particular institutional type—often small, often residential—that facilitates close interaction between faculty and students, and has a strong focus on liberal arts disciplines.

Artes Liberales
Historically, the basis for the modern liberal arts; the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) and the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric).

General Education
The part of a liberal education curriculum shared by all students. It provides broad exposure to multiple disciplines and forms the basis for developing important intellectual and civic capacities. General Education may also be called "the core curriculum" or "liberal studies."

Essential Learning Outcomes

Adapted from College Learning for the New Global Century, Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2007, page 18, figure 5.

More on Liberal Education

In Historical Perspectives

"When we ask about the relationship of a liberal education to citizenship, we are asking a question with a long history in the Western philosophical tradition. We are drawing on Socrates' concept of 'the examined life,' on Aristotle's notions of reflective citizenship, and above all on Greek and Roman Stoic notions of an education that is 'liberal' in that it liberates the mind from bondage of habit and custom, producing people who can function with sensitivity and alertness as citizens of the whole world." --Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, 1998

"Those persons, whom nature has endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens; and . . . they should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or circumstance." --Thomas Jefferson, 1779

"We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education." --Woodrow Wilson, 1909

"Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental." --W.E.B. DuBois, 1949

In the Twenty-first Century

"Education serves democracy best when it prepares us for just the kinds of questions we face now: questions about a wider world, about our own values, and about difficult choices we must make both as human beings and citizens. . . . The approach to higher learning that best serves individuals, our globally engaged democracy and an innovating economy is liberal education." --AAC&U Board of Directors, 2002

"The only education that prepares us for change is a liberal education. In periods of change, narrow specialization condemns us to inflexibility--precisely what we do not need. We need the flexible intellectual tools to be problem solvers, to be able to continue learning over time." --David Kearns, Xerox, 2002

"This division has not always existed. Both education and engineering have deep roots in our history as a nation. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, each in his own way, recognized that discovery and innovation are the twin pillars of a democratic society." --Joseph Bordogna, NSF, 2003

"This approach to liberal education--already visible on many campuses--erases the artificial distinctions between studies deemed liberal (interpreted to mean that they are not related to job training) and those called practical (which are assumed to be). A liberal education is a practical education because it develops just those capacities needed by every thinking adult: analytical skills, effective communication, practical intelligence, ethical judgment, and social responsibility." --Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, AAC&U, 2002

"Trends in post secondary education are moving in a very different direction. Not that there has been a policy debate about denying liberal education to some fraction of the college population. Rather, . . . liberal education [has moved] off the policy and public radar screen altogether." --Carol Schneider, Declining by Degrees, 2005

Statement on Liberal Learning

Read the Statement on Liberal Learning approved by the AAC&U board of directors (1998).

Other Publications on Liberal Education

College Learning for the New Global Century (LEAP Report)

Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College

Practicing Liberal Education