If a complete stranger had stumbled onto campus the weekend before last they might have thought that Augustana was the busiest college on the planet. That Saturday (January 17th), the Admissions Office hosted one of our largest annual open-house events for prospective students and families. While this event always draws large numbers, this year the number of visitors to campus (prospective students and their parents combined) may well have exceeded the actual number of Augustana students living on campus.
With the college recruiting season hurtling into the most critical few months of the year, every little bit of information that we can learn about prospective students and their parents and their decision-making process matters. To that end, we’ve been gathering data on the things that are most important to our prospective students and their parents as they evaluate, and ultimately select, a college. One way that researchers try to get at this kind of information is to ask folks to pick five words or phrases from a longer list of words or phrases that they think best describe an idyllic college experience. As you might expect from this year’s prospective students, “affordable” topped the list with 57% of the respondents choosing it. Other words near the top of the list included “friendly” (41%), “safe” (39%), “respected,” (38%), and “career-oriented” (33%).
Much further down the list, 15th to be exact, sits the phrase “liberal arts” (just 12% of respondents thought this was a top-five word for them). Since rank ordering the words selected ends up clustering “liberal arts” with a seemingly contradictory group of terms (e.g., “small,” “large,” “rigorous,” and “flexible,”), it’s clear that we probably shouldn’t go all Chicken Little just yet. Look on the bright side: only 6% of the respondents selected “party school.”
The question this finding raises for me, however, isn’t really about the exact ranking of the term “liberal arts.” My concern is that there seems to be a substantive gap between the degree to which we (faculty, staff, administrators, board members) use the phrase “liberal arts” to describe who we are and the level of importance that prospective students responding to this survey gave it. To make matters worse, this data doesn’t come from some general survey of potential college-going students; these responses came from students in our own inquiry pool (i.e., students who have either contacted us directly or students who fit a profile of those who might be interested in us).
Now please don’t conclude that I’m suggesting the elimination of the term or the philosophy behind it. On the contrary, I happen to think that if we are going to remain a viable college then we will have to explicitly embody a liberal arts philosophy that focuses on integrating and synthesizing preexisting knowledge. Almost exactly a year ago, I went on a three-post rant about it here, here, and here.
Rather, I suspect that the term “liberal arts” means very little of substance to prospective students. Maybe it is, like many other words that get used over and over again in marketing materials, a case where the phrase means one thing to an internal audience and something else to an external audience. When we use the term, even though we might not all agree exactly, I think we could describe relatively precisely the dispositions of a liberally educated individual. This finding increases my worry that when an external audience, most notably prospective students, sees this term, they have a much less precise sense of its meaning. In that context, “liberal arts” might mean little more than “small” or “rigorous.” It also could end up being interpreted to mean “lots of classes in fields I’m not interested in” or, even worse, “a club that maybe we’ll let you into.”
I certainly don’t have a brilliant answer to this challenge. But I think it is worth noting that just because we have a term that we believe describes us well doesn’t mean that this term will compel others who are new to the concept of college to buy what we are selling. There’s nothing wrong with believing in what we do; even drinking our own Kool-Aid. We just better be able to spell out what we do and why it works in a way that makes sense to regular folks who seem to care a lot more about affordability.
Make it a good day,
Mark
For me, it’s a term that needs to be better defined for prospective students and parents. In real world terms, yes, we educate people liberally, which allows students to explore a variety of fields in their pursuit of a major. But it also means that students that know exactly what they want to major in still have the flexibility to add classes and skills from other majors to their education. This is something many employers desire…for example, engineers with business sense/savvy, communication skills, and understand the progression/development of the company (history).
Good post, Mark. I wonder how different it would be if we were surveying prospective students for, say, Harvard. I suspect “liberal arts” would be far down the list for them, too.
What is there in public or private culture today that would form the attention of high schoolers to value the “liberal arts,” or even to know what this concept refers to? So we shouldn’t be surprised at the low ranking.
What if we changed the terms used? What if, instead of having people rank “liberal arts,” we asked them instead how important it is to attend a college where one learns to think, speak, and write well? Would the ranking improve?
Interestingly, Lendol, I was listening to Fresh Air the other day and Al Michaels was being interviewed on the topic of his recent memoir. In the middle of the interview, he went on a little spiel about the value of a liberal arts education for sports broadcasting, because above all you have to be able to communicate. He argued that students interested in broadcasting need to take communication studies and also lots of English classes, so that they actually know how to do things with language. It was one of the best, most practical, arguments for the liberal arts I’ve heard in awhile in popular culture! http://www.amazon.com/You-Cant-Make-This-Television/dp/0062314963
I think you’re right – there isn’t much in our culture that would spur high school students to value the liberal arts or have much sense of it is. Maybe we ought to be a bit surprised at ourselves that we’ve continued to use language to describe and promote ourselves that is virtually foreign to the students we are trying to recruit.
Oops, I meant to hit reply to your comment Mark.
My gist of my argument (below) is kids have already been exposed to the idea of a liberal arts education, in high school. It’s not called that in high school, of course, but it’s not a foreign concept.
A liberal arts education is in danger of seeming like “more of the same” (as in college-prep high school) to many kids.
Also, adults/parents know learning doesn’t halt outside a classroom. An intellectually curious person will read and learn about a wide range of subjects during their lifetime.
I predict the future will hold competency-based learning and a tailored field-oriented education. Math for health professionals, instead of making them take Calculus, for example.
It doesn’t surprise me that liberal arts is way down on the list.
Kids coming in from rigorous high schools have already been exposed to 4 years of science, 4 years of math, 4 years of a foreign language, 4 years of history, art, maybe religion classes, maybe some other social studies courses, physical education, health ed. Some of these classes are AP or IB.
Most participate in some sort of extracurricular whether it’s athletics or a club like robotics, Model UN, or debate. Then there’s volunteering and/or working.
And we’re expecting these kids who have already worked very, very hard across a range of subjects for four years in high school to prioritize “liberal arts” in college?
My HS teen is tired of being locked up in class rooms all day and then having 3-4 hours of homework and reading and paper writing per night. She’s going to be well prepared for the demands of college, but she wants something different.
She wants to study abroad. She wants to get out in the world and work (read: internships). She wants her four years of college to result in a good job or guaranteed entrance to professional school. She doesn’t want her courses in college to be almost an exact repeat of what she took in high school, only “harder and more in-depth”.