A liberal arts college places a lot of it’s efforts on things like reading, writing, psychology, and others – meaning NOT as much emphasis in science, research or health care. The liberal arts college will be able to educate you well in “liberal arts” like the subjects I mentioned before, so if you want a degree in something along those lines then a liberal arts college would be a good place for you to go.

A non-liberal arts college has emphasis in something other than liberal arts, which could be a host of different things depending on what school your talking about. But that’s the basics.

In current parlence, a liberal arts college usually means a primarily undergraduate institution that grants a bachelor’s degree with majors in the liberal arts and sciences. Some also grant a few master’s degrees such as education (M.Ed.) and/or business (M.B.A.). However, under the dominant classification system in higher education (Carnegie Foundation), when more than three master’s level degree programs are offered at a college, it becomes a “master’s granting institution” and might no longer be a primarily undergraduate institution. Doctoral granting and research universities are by definition universities and not primarily undergraduate institutions. There are also community colleges (that used to be called junior colleges), which offer the first two years of higher education for an associates degree such as the Associate of Arts (A.A.) and some technical training courses of study. Technically, a college is based on the thirteenth-century English college such as those found at Oxford or Cambridge. At a college the students and faculty members lived in the same building. The students studied works written in Latin, Greek, and sometimes Hebrew with an emphasis on theology and moral philosophy. The faculty members were responsible to educate the students in being a gentleman with good manners and civic responsibility. This was the dominant form of higher education until the late eighteenth century, even in the newly formed United States. About that time, the students wanted to start studying English literature, and works in other modern languages such as French and German. This more “liberal” curriculum was called the liberal arts. At the same time a number of “States” also wanted to have more practical education such as the study of mathematics for surveying the newly free territories they controled, and for navigation for merchant shipping. They also wanted students to learn the new ideas about botany and chemistry which could be used in agriculture. By about the decade of 1840, most colleges were teaching this curriculum in the liberal arts and sciences. The churches which were supporting most of the colleges were also finally completely forced out of teaching narrow denominationalism at about the same time. However, the goal of being a place of residence where faculty members could be models of good behavior and citizenship remained a part of the “college.” The English college is in contrast to the other form of higher education — the German university. In the German university, advancement of disciplinary knowledge was the main goal. The university was made up of “faculties” that studied a specific topic. The faculties were defined by the academic interests of the professors and not by the residential “family-like” living arrangement of the professors and students intended to produce a well-rounded citizen. The purpose of a university is to advance knowledge and train practitioners of certain skills and educate the next generation of scholars. But, I digress! An occupational hazzard of the professoriate. Most of the time, when people are talking about a type of institution and say it is a “college” they mean a liberal arts college. But, when they say something like “every one should go to college,” they mean any higher education institution.