Benjamin Ahnert was undecided about where he wanted to go to college when some Dutch friends told him about a relatively new liberal-arts college in the Netherlands. Most European students select their subject concentrations when they enter university and take a range of focused courses once enrolled.
Mr. Ahnert, who was taking a year off after high school in Germany, had not yet decided what he wanted to pursue. His indecision, normally an impediment for European students, made the liberal-arts approach all the more attractive.
“I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do economics or political science,” he explains, “and I was looking for a bachelor’s program where I could combine the two and see what I was interested in.”
Mr. Ahnert will graduate this July with a concentration in international relations and a minor in economics from University College Maastricht, a division of Maastricht University, where English is the language of instruction. The public liberal-arts college is one of six such institutions in the Netherlands, where the model has taken deepest root in Europe, with the first liberal-arts college appearing in 1998.
The approach is becoming increasingly popular in Europe, modeled on American liberal-arts colleges at a time when, ironically, they have come under fire from lawmakers and consumers in the United States who are concerned that they do not directly prepare graduates for the job market. Plans are under way to establish liberal-arts colleges in Germany, and education officials in Belgium, Sweden, and Slovakia have expressed interest. University College London, one of Britain’s leading universities, will offer a liberal-arts bachelor’s degree beginning next year.
Although the liberal arts have their origins in classical antiquity and provided the original foundation for European universities, American-style liberal-arts colleges are very much the exception in Europe, where entering students enroll directly, for example, in a university’s economics or law department.
The vast majority of European universities are public, and those on the continent are generally required to accept all students who pass qualifying examinations, such as the French baccalaureate. As a result, institutions have limited control over the shape and size of their student populations and often feature overcrowded lecture halls and little direct faculty-student interaction. Enrollments have risen sharply in the past decade, with facilities and faculty numbers often failing to keep pace with the rapid growth, compounding the problem.
University College Maastricht and its peers offer students a distinctly different experience. All are campus-based, giving them a student-focused, community atmosphere that sets them apart from traditional European universities, which often consist of many buildings scattered throughout a town or city. The dean of Maastricht’s college describes its curriculum as “one big elective,” and the extent to which liberal-arts students there can tailor their course of study to their interests is unmatched at mainstream universities, where degree programs are far more rigidly fixed.
A Different Experience
The sociology professor Hans Adriaansens founded Holland’s first liberal-arts college, at the University of Utrecht, in 1998, after having spent extended periods in the United States, including stints at Harvard University, Smith College, and Northern Illinois University. At each institution, he was struck by the strong focus on undergraduate education. “This was entirely different from what I was used to in the Netherlands,” he recalls. At the time, most Dutch universities combined the equivalent of a bachelor’s and master’s curriculum into a single degree. As a result, he says, “all the focus was on the last couple years.”
The way in which American students were expected to study a broad curriculum before deciding on an area of specialization also appealed to him.
“Most programs in the Netherlands are very specific,” he says. “You have to decide at age 18 what you are going to study, and it is impossible for students to make a well-considered choice. There are 483 university programs on offer in the country, and 483 chances to make the wrong choice.”
But the inflexibility of the higher-education system leads many students to drop out early, reinforcing the historic tendency of many continental universities to focus their efforts on more-advanced students. In the Netherlands, the dropout rate during the first semester is more than 35 percent, Mr. Adriaansens says. Graduation rates in some programs are about 25 percent, although overall rates are around 40 percent.
The high dropout rates, combined with rising enrollments and a decline in public financing of higher education, have helped spur interest in the liberal-arts model. As campuses became more cramped and classrooms larger, “there was a real concern that talent would just go unnoticed,” says Harm J. Hospers, dean of University College Maastricht. Advocates in favor of experimenting with the small-campus model used that concern to gather support for the legislation needed to allow them to select their students.
All of the Dutch liberal-arts campuses today are affiliated with universities but use separate, more selective admissions standards. Maastricht, located in a picturesque city in the southern, historically Roman Catholic part of the country, has followed the formula that Mr. Adriaansens pioneered at Utrecht, with modifications.
Unlike the other Dutch liberal-arts colleges, Maastricht is not residential. For Mr. Ahnert, who turned 21 during his first year, that was central to its appeal. “I felt a bit too old for that and wanted my freedom,” he says, as he lounges in the cavernous common room around which student life revolves. By European standards, much of Mr. Ahnert’s experience at Maastricht has been anomalous, as he has come to appreciate when he compares notes with his friends back home. “It’s much more personal here,” he says. “I can actually get a reply from a professor. When I have a question, I can just walk into their office. In Germany they have open office hours maybe once a week, or once every two weeks.”
About 600 students are enrolled in Maastricht’s three-year liberal-arts program, with about a third from the Netherlands, a third from neighboring Germany, and the rest from other European countries and farther afield. The college has 14 core teaching-staff members and relies on the wider university for professors to teach courses that its dedicated staff cannot handle.
Gerard Mols, the university’s rector, says “there is competition to teach at the university college” from elsewhere in the institution. “It’s an honor to be invited to teach at the university college,” he says, where the highly motivated, talented students are a draw.
The college offers small, tutorial-size classes. In many large European universities, class sizes are often so large that “nobody cares if you show up, nobody will notice,” says Teun J. Dekker, vice dean of academic affairs at the college. “In a small tutorial, people notice if you’re not there.”
Mr. Ahnert has thrived on the college’s relative intimacy but says that some elements of its approach, which are so different from the laissez-faire attitude he would have been likely to experience at a German university, can be overwhelming. “We seem to be obsessed with deadlines and with examinations,” he says. In a regular university, he says, there would be fewer exams, which would matter more, “and you are a bit more free to take it easy for a few weeks.”
At Maastricht, European students pay the national tuition rate of about 1,670 euros (about $2,475) a year, although some of the other university colleges charge higher rates than the universities with which they are affiliated. With its small class sizes and student-friendly resources, including well-stocked computer labs and libraries open later than is usually the case at public universities, University College Maastricht offers an educational experience that is more costly than the norm.
Dean Hospers explains that Dutch universities receive financing based on the subjects they teach, with humanities and social sciences receiving less per student than, for example, medicine or the natural sciences. The university colleges, says Mr. Hospers, are financed at the same rate as the sciences.
“That’s how we can do this; that’s how we can survive,” he says. “I have 128 courses, and I never cancel a course, even if there’s only one student who signs up.” Such an approach would be unheard of at most European universities. In the long run, Mr. Dekker points out, conventional university programs can be just as expensive as the colleges, since they waste so many resources on students who drop out. “Even though we have to invest more in students, they are out the door on time.”
Voices of Dissent
The liberal-arts colleges have drawn their share of critics. Ronald Plasterk, a renowned biologist at the University of Utrecht and columnist who later became the country’s minister for education, famously assailed the movement as an elitist project designed to cater to overprivileged teenagers with short attention spans. Some academics worry that these institutions divert much-needed money from the wider university system, and that their explicitly selective approach to admissions is at odds with the notion that higher education should be available to everyone.
“I’m not against these colleges, but we should be looking at the quality of higher education in a broader sense, and we are always a little afraid that the university colleges will be only for the elite,” says Tanja Jadnanansing, a member of Parliament and the Dutch Labour Party’s spokeswoman on higher education.
Rector Mols recalls that the push to create a liberal-arts college initially met staunch opposition from faculty deans who “were afraid the college would take students from them.” Professors and administrators also feared that money would be siphoned away from the rest of the university to pay for the college, and that graduates would have trouble finding their footing. Would they be accepted to top master’s programs? Would employers value their credentials?
Yet just a few years in, the colleges are demonstrating success. For one thing, they do not suffer the dismal dropout rates of the public universities: Nearly 90 percent of all entering students graduate.
Their graduates are also routinely admitted to the most competitive graduate programs in Europe and elsewhere, administrators say. Mr. Ahnert, for example, is planning to pursue a master’s degree in Latin American studies at Oxford.
A national bureau that tracks annual labor statistics among university graduates has found that Maastricht and other liberal-arts colleges can boast high rates of employment among alumni. “This means we are preparing our students well for the global labor market,” says Mr. Mols.
“We still have some work to do explaining to employers what this is,” says Mr. Hospers, but he notes that the college’s reputation has grown, and that it has become a known and respected entity.
The influence of the liberal-arts model is also being felt beyond the handful of institutions that have embraced it. A recent government commission that examined the future of education in the Netherlands recommended increased differentiation in the higher-education system and the mainstream adoption of several features identified with the colleges, including admissions interviews for students, more-challenging curricula, and lower faculty-student ratios. “In many ways,” says Mr. Dekker, the colleges were ahead of their time.”
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