There has been a clear shift in higher education to prepare and empower the current students for a future quite different and more complex than that faced by previous generations. In particular, it is expected that they will possess comprehensive abilities to deal with challenges arising from new employment demands and beyond. While liberal arts education has a long history in the West, it has been increasingly implemented more recently in East Asia as one response to the need for educational reform. The research reported here is an empirical study of how liberal arts education has affected individuals from two institutions with distinctive interpretations of "liberal arts education" - University N, the first Sino-foreign joint university in mainland China, and University L, the only public liberal arts university in Hong Kong. Drawing on Bourdieu's Theory of Practice, this study illustrates the interplay and balance among students' practical concerns, their sense of social obligation fostered through liberal arts education elements and the wider social structure. Semi-structured interviews with senior students, fresh graduates, and educators were conducted to gather in-depth primary data. These reveal that, by providing interdisciplinary knowledge and transferable skill sets, a liberal arts education experience does enhance individuals' personal agency and intellectual competencies in a professional context - they are trained to become independent thinkers and learners. Moreover, the "humanistic" aspect of liberal arts is also relevant: having engaged in various activities and programs, students in both universities are encouraged to care, cooperate, and make positive differences in their increasingly interconnected communities. Copyright ©2024 Eurasian Society of Educational Research.

The COVID-19 pandemic has instigated considerable unprecedented challenges to tertiary education in the aftermath of the mass shutdown of universities across Hong Kong since early 2020. Accordingly, shifting the traditional modalities to the online model has been opted for as the only reasonable alternative in the breakout period. It is, then, essential for educators to perceive the extent to which students’ learning attainments and experiences have been negatively impacted by these educational changes in the post-pandemic era. With the aim of examining the abrupt changes which the freshmen students’ e-learning experiences and their learning environment have undergone before and after the pandemic, the present quantitative study was conducted at a Liberal Arts Institution in Hong Kong, whose data was collected via the web-based questionnaire FYSLES, or “first-year student learning experience survey”. Quantitative analysis of responses indicated that students’ impressions and experience of liberal arts education, and students’ personalities and skills development, presented a U-shaped trend during the COVID-19 pandemic. The underlying rationale of this study is addressed to higher education policymakers to orient and add value to their safety measures, pertinent recommendations, as well as in context strategies that could be established in view of the pandemic’s detrimental effects. © 2023 by the authors.

This chapter discusses the development and role of graduate education within a liberal arts college context by examining the case of Lingnan University, Hong Kong. With a student-centered focus, Lingnan University applies evidence-informed teaching and experiential learning to integrate liberal arts education, graduate programs, and research to enhance students’ learning experiences and maintain the core of whole-person education. Lingnan University’s efforts demonstrate the potential of developing graduate education in the liberal arts context, which can serve as implications for other liberal arts higher education institutions. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

In this paper, taking as our point of departure the importance of China's " boya " education (BYE) and the West's liberal arts education (LAE) in an era that will be increasingly dominated by information technology (IT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), we examine the importance of BYE in Mainland China and LAE in the U.S. and Hong Kong. We argue that (a) the recent resurgence and growing significance of LAE in the world has been due to the right skill sets it provides in the information technology era in which many new jobs will be created and existing jobs destroyed ; (b) professional or technical training is not only compatible with the fundamental values of boya or liberal arts but also important in showcasing the strengths of BYE and LAE; (c) the combined benefits of BYE or LAE and professional or technical training may be achieved by adopting the main features of LAE such as its broad-based curriculum and whole-person development approach to undergraduate education or by combining a student's undergraduate and postgraduate studies over time; and (d) for BYE to achieve its goals in China it should occupy a central rather than tangential role in the undergraduate curriculum. Copyright © 2021 Elsevier.