Liberal arts colleges in the United States

While there is no nationwide legal standard in the United States, the term "university" is primarily used to designate graduate education and research institutions, and is reserved for doctorate-granting institutions,[2] and some US states, such as Massachusetts, will only grant a school "university status" if it offers graduate programs in multiple disciplines.

[3] These colleges also encourage a high level of student-teacher interaction at the center of which are classes taught by full-time faculty.

Other well-known consortia in the Eastern United States include the Little Three, Colby-Bates-Bowdoin Consortium, the Seven Sisters Colleges, and the Little Ivies.

Chapter One of Howard Greene and Matthew Greene's Hidden Ivies: Thirty Colleges of Excellence, "The Liberal Arts: What is a Liberal Arts Education and Why is it Important Today", defines the goals of a liberal arts education in the following manner: In a complex, shifting world, it is essential to develop a high degree of intellectual literacy and critical-thinking skills, a sense of moral and ethical responsibility to one's community, the ability to reason clearly, to think rationally, to analyze information intelligently, to respond to people in a compassionate and fair way, to continue learning new information and concepts over a lifetime, to appreciate and gain pleasure from the beauty of the arts and literature and to use these as an inspiration and a solace when needed, to revert to our historical past for lessons that will help shape the future intelligently and avoid unnecessary mistakes, to create a sense of self-esteem that comes from personal accomplishments and challenges met with success.

The Washington Monthly and U.S. News & World Report provide rankings specifically of liberal arts colleges.

As a result, "a majority of the approximately 80 presidents at the meeting said that they did not intend to participate in the U.S. News reputational rankings in the future.

The peer survey is by nature subjective, but the technique of asking industry leaders to rate their competitors is a commonly accepted practice.

[13][14] Indeed, according to a 31 August 2006 article in The New York Times, "It is still far too early to sound the death knell, but for many small liberal arts colleges, the SAT may have outlived its usefulness.

The former president of Sarah Lawrence, Michele Tolela Myers, described the rationale for this decision in an article for The Washington Post on 11 March 2007, saying: "We are a writing-intensive school, and the information produced by SAT scores added little to our ability to predict how a student would do at our college; it did, however, do much to bias admission in favor of those who could afford expensive coaching sessions."

She further argues that if SLC were to decide to stop sending all data to U.S. News & World Report, their ranking would be artificially decreased.

[19] As of 2007, according to U.S. News & World Report, Sarah Lawrence was the only "major" American college that completely disregarded SAT scores in its admission process.