I wrote a post last week where I mentioned a recent NPR story (Economy Puts Value Of Liberal Arts Under Scrutiny), a story saying that liberal arts colleges "have long had a rap of being a kind of luxury, where learning is for learning's sake, and not because understanding Aristotle will come in handy on the job one day.”

On the Huffington Post this week, Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, offered his response to the story.  Here's his take on the real value of a liberal arts education:

Why is there still such a strong desire to be part of a diverse campus community when one can access content (often for free) in one's own way at one's own pace? It's because a campus community still functions as a powerful catalyst for lifelong learning — and the ability to keep learning over a lifetime has never been so essential as it is today. Liberal arts education no longer draws on the cultivated homogeneity of a country club (or the boardroom). Today selective schools create communities in which people learn from their differences while forming new modes of commonality. We don't do this to be politically correct. We do it to prepare students to become lifelong learners who can navigate in and contribute to a heterogeneous world after graduation."