This fall will be my first semester at Lake Forest College. The wonderful thing about the American system of higher education is choice. Public or private? Large or small? Like millions of students--here in the Chicago area and nationwide--I had to choose the right kind of school for me.

True, my "freshman year" will be different because I'll be the college's president. But my experience in considering Lake Forest College gave me the opportunity to think about the wide range of choices in American higher education today. Students have never had more options--from large research universities like Northwestern and the University of Chicago, to fine small colleges like Lake Forest, to a growing number of online programs. This educational diversity makes us the envy of the world. In my case, I chose to "downsize," leaving the job of vice president at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution with more than 40,000 students, faculty and staff, in order to "enroll" at Lake Forest, which has 1,300 students. A friend called this a reverse commute, and it does run counter to the stream of students and faculty currently flowing toward larger institutions.

So why head in the opposite direction?

First, many believe an education in the liberal arts is the best possible preparation for students in this new millennium. The fact is, a liberal arts curriculum provides a broad grounding in diverse areas of knowledge--biology, chemistry, psychology, economics, languages, literature, the arts--and it also requires students to become well versed in research and analysis by digging deeply into at least one of these areas.

The result? Intellectual agility, the ability to adapt quickly to changing circumstances, and great strength in drawing connections between different bodies of knowledge and using them to solve new and complicated problems. It follows that students who acquire these attributes will become leaders in their fields.

Second, for many students, small residential liberal arts colleges provide unique and irreplaceable settings for their undergraduate education. Close, continuous, personal interaction between faculty and students is a hallmark of these colleges, one that is virtually impossible to achieve at institutions with much larger student bodies.

A single statistic illustrates this point. Each year, by design, fewer than 300,000 students attend the entire group of small liberal arts colleges like Lake Forest that are deemed "national" by the Carnegie Foundation because they attract students from across the country. Almost any combination of four or five Big Ten universities, by contrast, has a larger total student population.

Small colleges offer unique interaction--classes are small, and faculty members really do get to know the names of their students.

I left a large institution for a small one because I value community. But I was not driven by nostalgia for a Norman Rockwell vision of small-town life--although, as it turns out, my family and I have been invited to backyard barbecues with colleagues from the college, much to our delight.

No, what really motivated me was a strong belief that active participation in a community should be a central part of undergraduate education. Small liberal arts colleges have historically understood this. As self-governing institutions, they have recognized their responsibility to help students learn and appreciate both the rights and the duties of citizenship, before the students proceed into the larger world where they will exercise those rights and duties on their own. They have served as fertile seedbeds for democracy.

Importantly, strong community is not a function of homogeneity at small colleges. On the contrary, we take pride in bringing together students and faculty who are diverse in background, geography, race, mind and ambition. At Lake Forest, students of all races come from 47 different states and 44 foreign countries, and this diversity is a vital ingredient in the education we provide. Students learn a great deal from others not like them.

So I have come to a place that is small in size, intentionally and comfortably so, and yet a place very large in aspiration and educational commitment. I have come to a liberal arts college that prepares students for life. It's a great choice.