Southwest Minnesota State University (SMSU) is a public, four-year university that is part of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System.

It is located in Marshall, Minnesota, United States, a city of 13,680 people.

The school has a full-time enrollment of approximately 3,700 students and employs 148 faculty members.

It is divided into two major colleges, the College of Arts, Letters, and Sciences, and the College of Business, Education, and Professional Studies.

SMSU is accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.

The liberal arts (Latin: artes liberales) are those subjects or skills that in classical antiquity were considered essential for a free person (Latin: liberalis, "worthy of a free person") to know in order to take an active part in civic life, something that (for Ancient Greece) included participating in public debate, defending oneself in court, serving on juries, and most importantly, military service.

Grammar, logic, and rhetoric were the core liberal arts, while arithmetic, geometry, the theory of music, and astronomy also played a (somewhat lesser) part in education.

A public university is a university that is predominantly funded by public means through a national or subnational government, as opposed to private universities.

Whether a national university is considered public varies from one country (or region) to another, largely depending on the specific education landscape.

Education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits.

Educational methods include storytelling, discussion, teaching, training, and directed research.

Education frequently takes place under the guidance of educators, but learners may also educate themselves.

Education can take place in formal or informal settings and any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts may be considered educational.

The methodology of teaching is called pedagogy.

A profession is a vocation founded upon specialized educational training, the purpose of which is to supply disinterested objective counsel and service to others, for a direct and definite compensation, wholly apart from expectation of other business gain.

The term is a truncation of the term "liberal profession", which is, in turn, an Anglicization of the French term "profession libérale".

Originally borrowed by English users in the 19th century, it has been re-borrowed by international users from the late 20th, though the (upper-middle) class overtones of the term do not seem to survive retranslation: "liberal professions" are, according to the European Union's Directive on Recognition of Professional Qualifications (2005/36/EC) "those practiced on the basis of relevant professional qualifications in a personal, responsible and professionally independent capacity by those providing intellectual and conceptual services in the interest of the client and the public".