ACLS to Present New Findings on Value of Liberal Arts Education

On Thursday, July 17, and Friday, July 18, 2025, ACLS will host presentations by the AVDF/ACLS Fellows for Research on the Liberal Arts. The program is made possible by a generous grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. 

In June 2024, ACLS awarded five fellowships supporting research projects examining how the liberal arts impact a variety of learners at different stages and aspects of their lives and careers. Fellows received training on and access to the vast  College and Beyond II (CBII) database, which is comprised of more than one million student records, 50 million course enrollments, and alumni surveys for 2,800 respondents.

The resulting research both solidifies and disrupts familiar assumptions about the impact of liberal arts education in the United States, including how graduates’ civic and democratic beliefs and the relationship between student loan debt and civic engagement among college graduates across a variety of majors.

“The liberal arts curriculum is often thought of as the ‘secret sauce’ of US higher education,” explained ACLS Vice President James Shulman. “But quantifying this approach’s effects on students and their lives isn’t easy to do.  These projects use the College & Beyond II database to do just that – and, moreover, this research shows the capacity of this particular database to provide evidence for other scholars and educational leaders to investigate fundamentally important questions about the varied impacts of studying the liberal arts.” 

In addition to providing an opportunity for the fellowship awardees to present their work, the July convening will also feature discussion with thought leaders including Lynn Pasquerella, President of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, on the need to advance more research in this area.

Research papers for each awarded project will be published on acls.org and the ACLS Manifold Instance to maximize access and ongoing discussion on this urgent topic.