This Small College Has a Message: The Liberal Arts ‘Are Not Dead’

Beloit College was in trouble. Prospective students and their parents were increasingly skeptical that a liberal-arts education, the core academic offering at this private college in Wisconsin, was worth the investment. Enrollment had dropped by nearly 25 percent over a decade.

In the spring of 2023, the college could see that it would once again miss its enrollment targets for the next academic year.

Around the same time, Eric Boynton became Beloit’s president. Boynton sat down with the departing president, Scott Bierman, who’d led Beloit for the previous 14 years, and started to think about how to better sell the college to prospective students.

Beloit didn’t set out to cut programs, like many struggling colleges have done. Instead, it aimed to repackage the college’s curriculum.

The existing liberal-arts majors would remain largely the same. But growing programs like marketing, business management, and finance would be bolstered through new courses, majors, and minors — many of which explicitly integrated the humanities. A business-ethics course taught by a philosopher, for example; a literature course analyzing the use of storytelling in business.

Beloit debuted its first two schools this fall, one for business and the other for health sciences, to bring these changes to life. The new units — designed like the discipline-specific schools at large universities — will try to blend a focus on students’ future careers with the critical thinking that stems from a liberal-arts education.

Institutions like Beloit are grappling with the demographic cliff and public doubts about their value simultaneously. Some have tried to reimagine themselves in recent years, and the results have been mixed.

It’ll take time to see how Beloit’s efforts fare. But Boynton, a philosopher by training, believes the college has a compelling pitch. “Liberal arts and the humanities are not dead,” he said.

Changing the Narrative

Over the past few years, not enough students were buying what Beloit was selling.

Enrollment hovered between 1,400 and 1,500 students for most of the last decade, then began declining two years before the pandemic started. It dipped under 1,000 in 2020, and inched up to 1,001 in 2021, according to federal data. In the fall of 2022, Beloit enrolled 1,082 students, the college told The Chronicle.

Interest in humanities majors specifically was trending down. Between 2007 and 2022, the number of Beloit students completing degrees in the visual and performing arts fell by more than half, according to federal data. English degrees fell by two-thirds. Foreign-language degrees fell by three-quarters.

Degrees conferred in the physical sciences remained steady over that period. Business, management, marketing, and related support services experienced growth.

Still, as senior leaders see it, Beloit is better equipped to respond to the tectonic shifts disrupting higher ed than many of its liberal-arts peers. Educational experiences outside the classroom are already part of the college’s DNA, Boynton said.

The “Beloit Plan,” which dates back 60 years, introduced a year-round curriculum where students got jobs over the summer and connected their work experiences to the classroom in the fall. It “was a valuable experience for Beloit harnessing the power of liberal arts,” Boynton said.

The town of Beloit is located on the Wisconsin-Illinois border, an hour from Milwaukee and Madison, and two hours from Chicago — making it easier to work with industry partners and alumni in urban centers, Boynton said.

The college also has diversity going for it: One-third of Beloit’s domestic students identify as nonwhite, and international students are also a growing population, he said.

Over the summer, five teams of administrators, faculty, and staff at Beloit sought to pinpoint the college’s competitive advantages. They examined different areas of campus operations, dove into the data, and put ideas on paper.

The teams were focused on academic programs and partnerships, budget, use of space, enrollment, and student experience. No team was a “silo of itself,” Boynton said, because all of those factors affect enrollment.

The student-experience team set out to tackle virtual learning’s lingering effects on student engagement. Boynton said having “shared, celebratory” events on campus has “caught wind.” A recent volleyball game turned out 250 students, he said, which is roughly a quarter of the student body, and even though the Buccaneers didn’t win, it was a “raucous affair.”

Meanwhile, Beloit’s campus is large for its small student population, so the space-use team brainstormed ways to make the campus feel more lively, Boynton said. The college had already taken steps in that direction: The “Powerhouse,” a former power plant, was renovated in 2021 and now hosts spaces devoted to recreation, campus activities, and student health.

The budget team looked for cost savings. The enrollment team helped devise plans to boost outreach — to local students who hadn’t traditionally considered attending the college down the street, as well as students from nearby states.

Connecting to Careers

The team looking at academic programs and partnerships started their work from the premise that Beloit didn’t have an educational problem. It had a perception problem.

“It’s not so much a retention issue as a recruitment issue,” said Daniel Michael Youd, a professor of modern languages and literatures. Once the students are through Beloit’s door, Youd believes that “they throw themselves into the experience” and “they love it.” Beloit’s retention rate is 90 percent, above the national average.

The team found that much of Beloit’s curriculum already aligns with what students look for when shopping for a college, but that was lost in translation to prospective students, Youd said.

So Beloit’s new schools are both a model for learning and a marketing tool. The schools “call out” a “profession” or “labor market” through their names, allowing the college to make career connections in one sentence, Boynton said.

While “traditional departments will remain intact,” the structure “makes clear connections to careers” by bringing academics, alumni networks, internships, and community-based learning under one roof, said Donna Oliver, Beloit’s provost and dean.

The first two schools — the School of Health Sciences and the School of Business, Economics, and Entrepreneurship — launched this fall. Two more, Media and the Arts, and Environment, Climate, and Sustainability, are in the works. Each school “reflects traditional strengths of the college,” Oliver said.

Though some humanities majors aren’t attracting the interest they once did, the college wants to keep them central to its schools.

Each school will have a “liberal-arts core,” said Oliver, referring to a collection of courses that “complement” the school’s main discipline. For instance, within the business school, Boynton said, there will be a course taught by a literature professor titled “The Medieval Manager” that looks at management from a historical perspective.

Beloit’s health-sciences programs have long required students to learn across disciplines, said Ron Watson, an associate provost at Beloit and a professor of health and society and political science. Students learn about medical mistrust among different demographic groups, helping them “build relationships of trust” with their future patients, Watson said.

To shore up internship opportunities for students, the college has created Impact Beloit, a campus initiative focused on professional development. It’s part of the college’s efforts to build a better relationship with the city of Beloit.

The college’s internship placements range from Fairbanks Morse Defense, the nation’s largest naval-engine supplier, to nonprofit organizations like Community Action, which works to end poverty. Students can also be paired with an alumni mentor who works in a similar field.

Students worry that they won’t get a job without specialized knowledge or technical skills, said Tim Leslie, director of Impact Beloit.

What Beloit is doing, Leslie said, makes room for the “experiential learning” needed to grow these skills while “staying true” to the college’s culture.

Looking to the Future

The outlook for liberal-arts colleges remains challenging. Institutions have dabbled in different strategies to stem the bleeding, from retooling academic offerings to cutting tuition costs to adding sports.

One promising sign is that Beloit appears to be “playing offense and not defense,” by allowing faculty to take ownership of the curricular changes, said Eric Hayot, a professor of comparative literature and Asian studies at Pennsylvania State University who has written about the decline in humanities enrollments.

Colleges often default to a “disaster reaction” when reappraising their offerings, meaning they gut departments or blindside faculty, Hayot said.

David Strauss, a principal with Art & Science Group, a consulting firm that works with colleges, said that “organizational changes” on their own are usually not enough to confront the demands of an ever-changing market.

Colleges need “to do more than be good at the liberal arts,” Strauss said, and they must find ways to “make changes in the student experience” to raise enrollment.

Boynton agreed, adding that liberal-arts colleges shouldn’t “shy away from” career-oriented language.

The college plans to measure success through its annual student-experience survey, Boynton said. Responses as to whether students feel they’ve had access to internships, faculty mentorship, and career preparation will provide the college feedback as to whether the schools are doing what they’re intended to do, he said.

In a few years’ time, Boynton said the college will be able to look at whether the students who engaged with Beloit in the application process were interested in the same areas offered by the new schools. Even further down the road, the college may seek input from alumni of the schools, Boynton said.

If Beloit sees results, other colleges might have a “model” to follow, Hayot said. Beloit’s ideas, he said, might allow the humanities to “grow rather than continue to shrink.”