By Roger H. Martin
Randolph-Macon belongs to an organization called "The Annapolis Group." To be a member, a college must demonstrate a deep commitment to the liberal arts and sciences, provide students with a comprehensive residential experience, and have a selective admission’s policy. You would think that this exclusive club, which includes prestigious colleges as diverse as Amherst, Colorado College, Drew, and Sewanee, wouldn’t have a worry in the world. Yet twice a year, Annapolis Group presidents, including myself, sit around a large table trying to put a finger on what distinguishes their institutions from larger research universities and more vocationally-oriented colleges that increasingly define higher education in this country.
They have good reason for doing this. When I went to college almost 40 years ago, small residential liberal arts colleges like Randolph-Macon were a very visible part of the academic landscape. Today they hand out only 20 percent of America’s baccalaureate degrees, and their numbers continue to diminish.
David Breneman, an educational economist and dean of the school of education at the University of Virginia, has shown that most of the 800 "liberal arts" colleges in the U.S. are liberal arts in name only, having long ago moved in a more vocational direction. Today, primarily the Annapolis Group and its 90 member colleges uphold a two century’s old tradition that, until now at least, has exemplified American higher education at its best. And this is why members of the Annapolis Group anguish. They know that small, residential liberal arts colleges provide the most effective education ever devised. But faced by a cost-conscious public demanding facts and figures to justify the high cost of quality undergraduate education, members of the Annapolis Group find it frustratingly difficult to "prove" their case.
I have found these Annapolis Group meetings extremely frustrating as well, because I, too, intuitively know that neither large universities, where the focus is on research rather than teaching, nor "virtual" universities where students take classes over the Internet in the comfort of their living rooms but rarely see a real professor or a fellow student, nor vocational colleges where the curriculum is so narrow and focused that graduates run the risk of becoming redundant the day they graduate can beat a residential liberal arts education for quality education. But I can’t prove it either. On the other hand, I am myself the product of a small liberal arts college. And while I cannot provide evidence that small colleges like Randolph-Macon do a better job educating undergraduates than, say, Yale or Harvard or the University of Virginia, I can say something about what they have done for countless generations of people like me.
Like many pimply-faced, insecure 17-year olds, I went to college with an inferiority complex. Intellectually and socially immature for my age, I had hoped that I might go to an Ivy League university like my father. I eventually ended up at Drew University, a small liberal arts college in Madison, N. J., figuring that I would have to settle for second best. It didn’t take long to realize how wrong I was. Drew more than matched an Ivy League education. It provided me with a safe but stimulating environment in which I could grow up socially and intellectually, emerging four years later as a highly-educated and professionally-focused person. This would not have happened either in a highly-competitive Ivy League environment, where only the fittest survive, or in an academic warehouse where students are social security numbers.
Last year I relived college admissions madness through my youngest daughter, Emily, a high school senior trying to decide where she would go to college. Even more than was the case for my generation, the pressure on today’s high school seniors to attend a prestigious private or public "Ivy" or a large state university is intense. And even though recent studies have shown that there is no measurable financial advantage to attending a large university compared to a small college, many parents still believe that a diploma from a flag-ship state university or from the Ivy League is essential to good fortune and happiness. What I wanted to tell my daughter, however, is that at the end of the day, the results of a college education - what kind of person one becomes in life - is really what matters and that the most favorable results occur in small residential colleges where real professors teach students in small classes and where students learn to become leaders in society by playing intercollegiate athletics, getting elected to student government, or serving as counselors in the residence halls.
Of course, I cannot prove my argument. Only a handful of researchers have studied what happens to students as a direct result of the colleges they attended. If you think about it, magazines that engage in the rating game, publications like US News and World Report and Peterson’s Guide, to a large degree measure the "quality" of the nation’s colleges and universities by the board scores and high school class rankings of the 17-year olds these institutions admit. No college guide I am aware of measures institutional quality by the qualifications and skills of these same students after they graduate. As a consequence, Harvard is number one in the US News and World Report polls, not because of its alumni, an admittedly impressive group of people, but primarily because of the untried high school students who lined up last winter at its admission’s office.
To get a better measure of a college’s effectiveness, one needs to look much deeper than teenage credentials, brand names, or impressive architecture. One needs to look at a college’s inner fabric and how, over four years, it moulds and shapes the students who matriculate. Then one needs to look at the results, namely the alumni who are the end product of a liberal arts education. So with this idea in mind, let’s compare a small college like the one I attended to a prestigious research university. It could be Yale or Harvard, two private Ivies I know well and respect highly, or the University of Virginia, a public "Ivy" not too far from where I live. What do we find?
The first thing we find is that, unlike many prestigious research universities, small liberal arts colleges like Drew and Randolph-Macon, place a high premium on teaching undergraduates. Central to their philosophy is that nothing, not the Internet, graduate assistants, or televisions, can replace small classes with real professors.
Last year I remember visiting with Emily a prestigious mid-Atlantic research university. Against my better advice (or maybe because of it!) she had decided that colleges with more than 5,000 students were "hot"- to use the current teenage jargon for desirable colleges. People in the admissions business know that high school students these days tend to favor larger universities, preferably ones with winning Division I football teams. On a tour led by a rising junior, we entered an enormous library, the spot where our guide was to talk about the faculty. "We are mostly taught by teaching assistants," he bragged. "The real professors are old and don’t understand our generation. But the TAs are really cool." A rather brave mother standing next to me near the back of the group piped up somewhat petulantly "Why should I pay $30,000 a year to have my son taught by someone only a few years older than he is?" There was an uncomfortable silence, and the question was never answered.
During that silence, I thought about my student days at Drew. Relative to the cost of living in 1963, tuition was not cheap, but every penny was worth the quality of individual instruction I received from faculty members who spent as much time with me outside as they did inside the classroom. In particular I remember Charles Estus, then in his first year as a sociology professor. Prof. Estus was so obsessed with my relative lack of writing skills that he spent literally hundreds of hours helping me write and re-write college papers, whether or not for his class. And I remember James Pain, a professor of religion, who, at his own expense, would take his Religions of the World class to New York City and other places to visit Buddhist temples and Islamic mosques. Faculty like professors Estus and Pain were so attentive to my personal social and intellectual development, that when I finally made it into a coveted Ivy League graduate school, I was exceedingly disappointed. The personal attention I received from my professors at Drew was so outstanding that I had become hopelessly spoiled. Many of my graduate school professors were impressive, but because they often lived at great distance from the university, I no longer enjoyed the kind of easy access I had taken for granted at Drew. Moreover, while my graduate professors were all well-known scholars in their respective fields, promotion and tenure were determined more by research than by teaching, and as a consequence, few measured up to teaching skills of my professors at Drew.
Another difference between many small liberal arts colleges like Randolph-Macon and larger research universities is the students. Public and private Ivies are able to attract to their campuses the crème de la crème of the high school elite. These 17 year olds come to these universities well educated, and they leave well educated. But the "value added" - the intellectual change that takes place over four years - is greatest at small, residential liberal arts colleges. I am an example of this phenomenon: I went to Drew in 1963 as a college transfer with fair to middling freshman grades. I was admitted mostly because the dean of admissions saw in me undefined potential. Largely because of the care and nurture of the Drew faculty, I flowered intellectually and by junior year was solidly on the dean’s list. The intellectual change between when I started college in 1962 and when I graduated in 1965 was extraordinary, and I credit it all to my Drew professors. Had I attended Yale, like my father wanted, or a large research university like the ones my daughter was considering, I probably would not be president of Randolph-Macon today.
I have a friend in investment banking who attended an elite West Coast public "Ivy," hoping one-day to become a university professor. Like me, he was socially and intellectually callow when he first entered the university. But as the consequence of an academic program and a faculty that were unforgiving to less than brilliant students - and also clearly more dedicated to research than undergraduate teaching - my friend barely survived, graduating four years later close to the bottom of his class. With less than a distinguished academic record, he could not get into graduate school, and his dream of an academic career was crushed forever. Today he is a successful businessman; but he continues to resent the fact that his "Ivy" experience was a great disappointment.
Drew, on the other hand, provided a nurturing environment where my intellectual potential could mature and develop at a reasonable pace. And because of the extraordinary "value-added" I experienced, I sailed right into one of the best graduate schools in the country. For some reason, graduate admissions people are particularly turned on by undergraduate students who start out weak but end up strong!
So, to those who believe that nirvana is a big state university or the Ivy League, let me say this: America’s higher education establishment is strong because of its diversity. No one kind of college or university is necessarily better than another, and large research universities deserve their fine reputations. But as American higher education is increasingly defined by research agendas and high tech delivery systems, "quality education" will be exemplified by places like Drew and Randolph-Macon, institutions that operate on a human scale and "hand cultivate" their undergraduate students. If you believe in solid "outcomes," the chances that a student will experience "value added" in their intellectual and social development are much greater at small colleges with low student faculty ratios than at mega universities where "small" means a class of 200 students.
Finally, look at the alumni of the Annapolis Group colleges - the "product" of our collective endeavors. They are an extremely diverse and impressive group of people who are the movers and shakers at every level of our society. In my opinion, they are the ultimate "proof" of why residential liberal arts colleges have excelled in the past and will continue to do so in the future! |
