What do the European liberal arts colleges have have in common? They are selective, residential (students have to live on campus), and taught in English.

In the Netherlands Utrecht University College has been going for 10 years. Amsterdam University College started this year, and in 2010 Leiden University, the oldest in Holland, will start a college in The Hague.

In Germany Jacobs University in Bremen is certainly worth looking at.  The European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin has had its ups and downs and problems with funding.

These and other European colleges are organized into Ecolas, European Colleges of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

You can also get a liberal arts education in a traditional university. For example, the excellent Durham University in U.K. offers Combined Honours in Arts, Socials Sciences, or Natural Sciences.

Here are some useful books,

Strunk & White, The Elements of Style is probably the best known.

Joseph M. Williams’ Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace is also very good.

A personal favorite is Thomas & Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose.

If you can get in, you can afford to go.

Even if you attended a university that charged minimal or no tuition fees, it would still be more expensive than attending a U.S. university with need-blind admission. The need-blind university will not charge tuition if you can’t afford it, it will also not charge for room and board.

The following are need-blind for all applicants, including international students.

Amherst College

Dartmouth College

Harvard University

MIT

Princeton University

Williams College

Lawrence University

Yale University

You will probably get a better education at a liberal arts college, Williams or Amherst, than at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, and you will be less stressed out than at MIT.  Dartmouth is known for good teaching.

The best schools are organized into the APSIA, the Association of Professional School of International Affairs.

Here is a complete list of the member schools.

Berkeley is number 39? That doesn’t make much sense; Berkeley is surely better than that. It reminds me of a previous critique of this ranking;

Andrew Oswald, Professor of Economics at University of Warwick, laid out the following criticism of the 2008 Times Higher Education-QS league tables:

“This put Oxford and Cambridge at equal second in the world. Lower down, at around the bottom of the world top-10, came University College London, above MIT. A university with the name of Stanford appeared at number 19 in the world. The University of California at Berkeley was equal to Edinburgh at 22 in the world. Such claims do us a disservice. The organisations who promote such ideas should be unhappy themselves, and so should any supine UK universities who endorse results they view as untruthful. Using these league table results on your websites, universities, if in private you deride the quality of the findings, is unprincipled and will ultimately be destructive of yourselves, because if you are not in the truth business what business are you in, exactly? Worse, this kind of material incorrectly reassures the UK government that our universities are international powerhouses. Let us instead, a bit more coolly, do what people in universities are paid to do. Let us use reliable data to try to discern the truth. In the last 20 years, Oxford has won no Nobel Prizes. (Nor has Warwick.) Cambridge has done only slightly better. Stanford University in the United States, purportedly number 19 in the world, garnered three times as many Nobel Prizes over the past two decades as the universities of Oxford and Cambridge did combined. “