Thesis advisor: Philip G. Altbach / Liberal arts education is an emerging phenomenon in China. However, under the pressure of exam-oriented education, memorization, and lecture pedagogy, faculty, university administrators and policy makers have not embraced it whole-heartedly. Through qualitative methodology, this study explores the current thinking of Chinese policy makers, university administrators, and faculty members on liberal arts education and its challenges. A study of the perceptions of 96 Chinese government and university administrators and faculty members regarding liberal arts education through document analysis and interviews at three universities helps in comprehending the process of an initiative in educational policy in contemporary Chinese universities. This research analyzes Chinese policy making at the institutional and national levels on curriculum reform with particular emphasis on the role of education in shaping well-rounded global citizens, and it examines how the revival of liberal arts education in China would produce college graduates with the creativity, critical thinking, moral reasoning, innovation and cognitive complexity needed for social advancement and personal integration in a global context. This research also found that the revival of interest in liberal arts education in China demonstrated that government and universities have begun to realize that the current curricula, professional training, and narrowly specialized education fail to help students to be competent in a globalized economy, and liberal arts is valued in China, and will be more effective as politics, economy and society more developed. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

Using archival records preserved by Iowa’s community colleges, private four-year colleges, and public universities, this dissertation examines how Iowa’s established higher education institutions responded to and adjusted to the presence of new two-year colleges from 1965 to 1975. This decade was a critical period of development for Iowa two-year colleges as they were most vulnerable to and influenced by other education institutions during an economic downturn. This study also explores how the curricular tension between vocational education and liberal arts education shaped early relationships between Iowa’s new two-year colleges and other higher education institutions. Specifically, this dissertation examines six two-year colleges, seventeen private four-year colleges, and three public universities to understand how the curricular purpose, mission and identity, position in the higher education hierarchy, and reputation of each type of institution played a role in early relationship-building. Ultimately, this study sought to answer the question whether the state’s new two-year colleges developed relationships with other higher education institutions that increased educational opportunities for Iowa students. Chapter 2 explains how officials from Merged Area I and Western Iowa Tech, two of Iowa’s two-year colleges founded as vocational-only institutions, persisted in their efforts to offer liberal arts education. Officials from neighboring private colleges resisted their efforts because they believed two-year colleges that offered liberal arts education posed a competitive threat. Chapter 3 explores how Iowa’s two-year colleges posed a financial threat, as well as a curricular threat. Part I highlights how Iowa private college officials confronted the financial threat by collaborating with the Iowa Association of Private Colleges and Universities to advocate for the Iowa Tuition Grant. Part II shows how eight private colleges responded to the curricular threat in three distinct ways: strengthening their role as a liberal arts college, making significant institutional changes for long-term survival, and changing or creating new curricular programs. This dissertation also considers the contributions of Iowa’s three public universities, Northern Iowa, Iowa State University, and the University of Iowa. Chapter 4 explains how each university responded in a distinct way to the presence of two-year colleges. This dissertation concludes by explaining how this study contributes to the debate between scholars about whether two-year colleges were egalitarian institutions or diversion institutions, specifically, whether two-year colleges and their relationships with other higher education institutions provided Iowa students with more educational opportunities and the path to a baccalaureate degree. I concluded that the presence of Iowa’s two-year colleges pressured private college officials to respond in ways that increased educational opportunity, and officials from Iowa’s three public universities to respond in ways that helped two-year colleges secure a stronger position in the higher education system hierarchy, which strengthened the ability of two-year colleges to provide a path to a baccalaureate degree.

Thesis advisor: Karen Arnold / Liberal education has long claimed moral education to be a chief aim of its educational format. Liberal education supporters regularly assert its unique ability to foster moral and ethical development in students, but data regarding higher education's efficacy in promoting moral development are limited. Additionally, the educational goal of moral development suffers important philosophical and epistemological critiques which bring into question its adequacy as a worthwhile aim of contemporary higher education. In order to discern whether higher education resources should be used to pursue this educational objective, liberal arts practitioners and supporters must identify clearly what moral education is, whether it is a facet of college student development worthy of our attention, and how to adequately measure it. This study offers a careful analysis of data related to student moral reasoning development gathered in an evaluation process of a liberal education course at a mid-sized research institution. The central research questions focus on aspects of student moral development and students' perceptions of the moral dimensions of coursework and highlight how these interact with students' abilities to receive and process course materials and activities. The research design employs a concurrent triangulation approach to quantitative and qualitative course assessment materials. James Rest's Defining Issues Test (DIT), a well-researched, neo-Kolhbergian measure of moral reasoning, and student writing were analyzed in pre- and post-course evaluations to investigate students' moral reasoning development as they entered, changed and left a year-long liberal arts course. Results reveal important features of student moral growth, illuminating how students at different levels of moral reasoning development and with varying degrees of change with respect to moral reasoning engaged with liberal education course materials and activities in quite distinct ways. This is an important step in uncovering the unique aspects of liberal education that may foster and sustain moral growth. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.