In 2020, with funding from the Mellon Foundation, Ithaka S+R developed a novel approach to measuring a liberal arts and sciences educational experience and examined its relationship to student outcomes. Our researchers developed the Liberal Arts and Sciences Educational Offering (LASEO) Framework, which identified and described the key features of a liberal arts and sciences educational experience. Using this framework, we created an index of scores measuring the degree to which a subset of higher education institutions in the United States have offered those features to their students and compared those scores to institution-level outcomes.
With additional support from the Mellon Foundation and new support from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations (AVDF) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) in 2025, we created a new methodological approach—the Liberal Arts and Sciences Educational Experience (LASEE) Framework—designed to measure a liberal education at the student level. We applied the framework to 1.3 million student records in the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research’s (ICPSR) College and Beyond II (CBII) dataset to develop an index of scores measuring the degree to which students were exposed to the key features of a liberal education. We then examined how individual students’ experiences related to academic, labor market, and civic outcomes.
We invite you to engage with the resources that we have developed across both projects and encourage you to provide us with your feedback through the form below or by contacting Daniel Rossman at daniel.rossman@ithaka.org.
Liberal Arts and Sciences Educational Experience (LASEE)
- Announcement blog post – a brief overview of the project and key findings
- Project report – describes in full detail the background, activities, methodology, analyses, and findings from our project, as well as recommendations for future research
- Liberal Arts and Sciences Educational Experience (LASEE) Framework – an Excel file that lays out the framework, approach, and student-level proxy metrics for measuring the degree to which students are exposed to a liberal arts and sciences educational experience
- Liberal Arts and Sciences Educational Experience (LASEE) Metric Statistics – an Excel file that provides descriptive data on the individual-level metrics used to measure students’ exposure to the features of a liberal arts and sciences education
Liberal Arts and Sciences Educational Offering (LASEO)
- Blog post – a brief introduction to our motivation and approach for this project
- Executive summary – highlights the key activities and findings of the project
- Project report – describes in full detail the background, activities, methodology, analyses, and findings from our project, as well as recommendations for future research
- Liberal Arts and Sciences Educational Offering (LASEO) Framework – an Excel file that lays out our framework, approach, and institution-level proxy metrics for measuring the degree to which institutions offer their students a liberal arts and sciences educational experience
- Liberal Arts and Sciences Educational Offering (LASEO) Index Scores – an Excel file that lists the LASEO Index Scores generated for this project for a set of higher education institutions in the United States with available data
- Ithaka S+R presented the LASEO project at the College and Beyond II: Liberal Arts and Life public colloquium series led by researchers from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan; the slides and recording can be found here and here
Questions about our work? Use the form below.