Move over Keats — make way for Keynes.

Bard College, the scenic liberal arts institution in Annandale-on-Hudson, is taking a bite out of Wall Street. This fall, students at the college will be able to earn a bachelor of science degree in economics and finance, as part of a new five-year dual degree program.

On Bard’s leafy campus, where students meet in classes no larger than 22 people, students can choose to earn a B.S. in economics and finance while also working toward a bachelor’s degree in art, languages, history, math, or science.

“The need was there,” the president of the Levy Economics Institute at the college, Dimitri Papadimitriou, said.

Many Bard students want to become entrepreneurs or go to work on Wall Street, he said, and the finance courses now at the college have been oversubscribed, and not necessarily by economics students. “We had to respond to this demand,” he said.

A professor of religion and chaplain of the college, Bruce Chilton, said he thought the new dual degree program “accords with the recent development in Bard’s education philosophy.” Whereas many universities and a few colleges offer professional degrees that tend to be narrowly focused, he said, Bard offers qualifications in specialized areas such as music and finance, but within a liberal arts curriculum.

The dual degree program has been in the planning stages for 18 months, and the state has approved it.

With the Levy Institute on campus for many years, the college already had the people and “infrastructure” for such a program, and the dual degree is a way to connect the institute with undergraduate life, the president of Bard, Leon Botstein, said.

He added that an increasing number of Bard students are going to graduate or business school. “Why not give them a leg up?” he said.

Mr. Papadimitriou, who teaches a class in contemporary developments in finance focusing on behavioral economics, said economics has been taught at Bard for many years, but finance courses have been introduced only in the past five or six years. Two full-time faculty members teach finance, and another is being considered. Overall, there are seven full-time faculty members in the economics department.

Bachelor of arts students are always in demand for managerial positions because “they have a better sense of the world that we live in,” Mr. Papadimitriou, who is also executive vice president of Bard, said. Listing areas such as arts, culture, music, and science, he asked, “What better preparation can there be to a global economy?”

The vice provost of Columbia University’s Teachers College, William Baldwin, said people generally tend to have too narrow a conception of liberal arts education. “There’s the view that it’s disconnected from professional and more applied domains,” he said. “I actually think it makes more sense to really undergird any professional preparation with a broad liberal arts education.”

Mr. Papadimitriou said Bard’s dual degree program would begin with about 10 students and would likely grow to 50 or larger. Students will take 13 classes, such as statistics and econometrics, money and banking, corporate finance, financial investments, industrial organization, industrial trade, and finance, in addition to completing a senior project.

Liberal arts are vital, Mr. Chilton said. He added that literally since the Middle Ages, it has been recognized that human beings are not complete unless they can engage with the literature and philosophy, as well as the science of their own culture. Mr. Chilton, who is now at work on the “Cambridge Companion to the Bible,” said that in his opinion, only by engaging with the foundations of their culture can people develop a self-conscious understanding of their own moral values.

A professor of religion and theology at Bard, Jacob Neusner, said studying finance and economics along with arts is a “wonderful combination” that plays to the college’s strengths. It is good to turn out young people who are strong in philosophy, for example, and economics, he said. “They come out with a capacity to think clearly and to express themselves accurately.”

Bard’s business program runs counter to the impression that some have of small liberal arts colleges as fostering a utopian, otherworldly atmosphere. Gawker.com took a poll last month in which Sarah Lawrence College beat out Wesleyan University as the “most annoying” liberal arts school in America. The Web site began the poll listing a number of colleges, including Bennington College (“Hippie Haven in Vermont with optional grades and lots of ‘creative’ types”), Vassar College, Oberlin College, Reed College, Hampshire College, Smith College, and Bard. One Wesleyan graduate is quoted on the site as describing filling out housing forms and having “the option of writing in my personal gender expression.”

Not all small liberal arts colleges are expanding. At least one, Antioch College, famous for its adoption of a step-by-step consensual approach to sexual relations, is heading in the opposite direction, announcing that it will close.