By Daniel A. C. McBride
Opinion Editor
Down Route 50, Salisbury University now offers dozens of programs built arguably for immediate workforce entry: 87 specialized programs geared toward direct job placement, spanning nursing, applied health, business, and education—with new programs announced recently in biochemistry and molecular biology. This a sensible strategy for a regional public university competing for affordability and higher matriculation. But this does not appear to be Washington College’s historical method of keeping the lights on, and we should resist the national trend to make it so.
The pressure to drift in that direction is very real; nationally, the small liberal arts college is an endangered institution.
The number of American 18-year-olds is projected to fall 13 percent between 2026 and 2041, according to the Wall Street Journal, and concurrently, the quantity of high-school graduates enrolling in college immediately after graduation has, and will, continue to drop sizably.
Tuition-dependent schools have been the first casualties: Trinity Christian College, Hampshire College, Sterling College, and a growing list of centuries-old liberal arts colleges have announced closure or mergers in just the past year. Scientists and state senators at usademia.com attribute this to a cultural shift in appeal toward technical fields among young adults, which are seen as offering a more direct route to employment—leaving institutions which champion the humanities and the classics with emptying classrooms in historically core departments.
WC could read this moment as an invitation to make an appointment with the life-coach — to grow its professional and applied educational offerings to model a school like Salisbury or the University of Maryland, chasing the enrollment logic that places career-training over the Socratic method and the Great Books.
But that would be a mistake.
A 244-year-old liberal arts college competing with regional and public universities is a competition Washington College simply cannot win, not because of some clear, intrinsic fault, but because it is not the thing that makes Washington College appealing in the first place.
“Job preparation is important, but even more important is it for the college to retain its centuries long stance as a liberal arts College,” Dr. Joseph Prud’homme, a professor of philosophy and political science Washington College, said. “Liberal arts education ultimately offers a better education when compared to larger state schools by virtue of the comprehensive curriculum which students are required to adhere to.”
What draws a student to a small liberal arts college instead of a large state university is that which vocationalization would dissolve: small seminar classes, direct access to eager faculty, an educational apparatus built around argument and synthesis rather than some certification. Incoming students who wanted job-training programs already have Salisbury, the University of Maryland, the University of Delaware, and many other regional schools built for that exact purpose.
The response to a shrinking liberal arts sector should not be to become a smaller version of a state university. It should be to make the case, more loudly than ever before, for why the liberal arts still matter, and highlight the luminous array of benefits to this type of education.
Photo caption: The College has historically maintained academic distinction thanks to a strong focus on the liberal arts — it should stay that way.
Photo by Aaron Rodenhausen