Author: By Matthew Brelis, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, October 11, 1998

Page: D1

Section: Focus

Matthew Brelis is the Globe's Focus writer.

There was a time not too long ago when going to college meant four years of sampling the myriad intellectual riches of academia, from literature to music, from history to astronomy. Today's students don't have time for such luxuries.

Now students go to college in a hurry to learn the skills that will land them a job. A good job. Discovering, say, Ovid or Freud is mere distraction. It's economics that count -- personal economics.

Today, three-quarters of all graduates are in fields such as accounting, business, nursing, education, and computer science, each a vocation of sorts. That's a far cry from 1938 or even 1968, when pursuit of knowledge was more generalized, and half of all degrees awarded were in the arts or sciences.

Taking an even longer view: In 1900, seventypercent of all college graduates came from liberal arts colleges. Now, about 5 percent do.

That the image of liberal arts has declined can be seen in the experience of the former North Adams State College. Last year, the school changed its name to the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Freshman applications dropped 22 percent. School officials blamed the name change.

And Smith College, one of the nation's most prestigious liberal arts colleges, this month announced an ambitious program called "Praxis," translated from the Greek as practical learning, in which every junior or senior who wants a paid internship in a field related to their study will be provided one. In other words, the education alone was seen as not enough.

"For a certain group of students, the undergraduate years are clearly pre-professional," says Richard Breneman, dean of the School of Education at the University of Virginia, and author of "Liberal Arts Colleges: Thriving, Surviving or Endangered?"

"They know when they start college, they will go on to graduate school, to law school, medical school, or business school. And for those students, liberal arts is a luxury they can afford. . . . But if those kids did not go on to law school, they might be less inclined to settle for the pure liberal arts. For the undergraduate whose degree might be a terminal degree, those students feel, rightly or wrongly, that they need professional training as undergraduates."

As a result, he said, a "huge shift" in course offerings has occurred in the last 25 years. "In an ideal world, you would like to see a higher percentage of arts and science degrees than one in four."

Another problem facing liberal arts colleges, says Robert Zemsky, director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania, is that they are places where people study for four years. "The market in higher education is increasingly filled with students who want to go a course or two at a time, and work as they go. In fact, the market is growing in every area except where the liberal arts specialize."

In developing the internship program, Smith officials were looking at the next 25 years and decided on this program over other options such as altering the curriculum and offering "accounting and other applied programs," says Ruth Simmons, Smith's president.

"Liberal arts colleges have tended to define themselves as institutions of full-time sequestered study and there is a view that that is not really relevant for the world of work," Simmons says. "We are saying that is not true, but this is one way to reassure students and their parents that, if they take a liberal arts degree, this will ensure they will have the skills to enter the work world."

Not surprisingly, the increasingly popular view that liberal arts degrees are a $100,000 extravagance is disputed by college presidents like Simmons as well as by graduates and faculty. And they have a powerful ally, one that may surprise some nonbelievers in liberal arts education.

Study after study shows that heads of companies favor graduates from liberal arts institutions because they can generally communicate well, think quickly, are good at solving problems, and enjoy learning new things. But often the Human Resources departments that screen resumes would prefer to see transcripts that boast courses in accounting, rather than the Russian novel.

"If we want to produce men and women who can get a good job and hold it, and grow beyond it, what we need is certainly far more than a system using colleges as a farm team for business," says Jeffrey D. Wallin, president of the American Academy for Liberal Education.

Says Thomas Aceto, president of the renamed Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, "A lot of blue-collar parents don't understand, for example, that 60 percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have bachelor degrees from liberal arts colleges." The school -- known for its business and education programs -- will continue, he said, to try to create a small, public, liberal arts college with high admissions standards and low tuition bills -- and hope the drop in applications was a temporary phenomenon.

In 1996, a national poll by DYG Inc. found that parents and high school students viewed higher education as a critical component in preparing for a good job and high earning potential, but neither group had a good understanding of a liberal arts education.

Richard Hersh is the president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y., and the man who ordered the poll to confirm his suspicions that the idea of a liberal arts education had lost its allure. "What is it in the larger culture that has caused us to no longer believe in a liberal education," he asks.

Some of it, certainly, is the need to get a job, and the gnawing feeling that majoring in classics might not be marketable. But some of it, Hersh says, is "the malling of America."

"We are a mass consumer society that can get anything one wants wholesale, on the cheap. People have confused brand recognition and big-name football with the quality of a handcrafted education. But whenever anyone talks about excellence, it is small classes, professors who teach, lots of feedback, things that harken back to Socratic dialogue. Will we lose it before we can get back to it?"

Some might consider too much of it already gone.

Consider a 1996 study by the National Association of Scholars that reviewed US News & World Report's top 25 research universities and top 25 liberal arts colleges and found that the core curriculum -- once considered the backbone of a strong liberal arts education -- is a thing of the past.

In 1914, there was an average of 9.9 mandatory courses in those institutions. In 1964, the number had dropped to 6.4, and by 1993, there was an average of 2.5 mandatory courses. In the same time, the average number of undergraduate courses not requiring prerequisites jumped from 23 in 1914, to 127 in 1964, to 582 in 1993.

"The prevalent unwillingness to set priorities within the general education programs, together with the growing disinclination to insist on rigorous standards for completing them, suggest that undergraduate general education has become substantially devalued as an institutional objective," the study found.

"If you have the odd moment in your senior year, by all means take the `Sociology of the Soap Opera,' but it is worthwhile for anyone to read Shakespeare for insight into the permanent human condition -- love, death, betrayal are all there," says Glenn Ricketts, spokesman for the National Association of Scholars. "You can still get an excellent education at most of those schools, but it will not be due to any of their ideas about what you should do."

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