Published as:Mitchell, Kristine, and Cotton Seiler. Importing the American Liberal Arts College? In The Best Kind of College: An Insiders' Guide to America's Small Liberal Arts Colleges, edited by Susan McWilliams and John E. Seery, 259-73. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015. This author post-print is made available on Dickinson Scholar with the permission of the publisher. For more information on the published version, visit SUNY Press's Website.

The liberal arts model of higher education is simultaneously under attack in the United States--the place where it is most entrenched--and being embraced, at least in part, elsewhere in the world. In this essay, we look at the utilitarian concerns that motivate these domestic and international shifts, paying special attention to what Chinese experiments with liberal arts education might mean for future developments in that country.