Marty O’Connell is a force of nature… and a college search Zenmaster. As the Executive Director of the non-profit organization, Colleges That Change Lives, she has been serving up anecdotes as antidotes to the high-stakes, high-pressure, win-at-all-costs college admission game that repeats itself year after year. We have the good fortune this week of traveling with Marty O’Connell and nearly all of our fellow Colleges That Change Lives as we make our way up the East Coast this week at a series of information nights. We will do the same in August all over the country. (For locations and dates, visit CTCL.org.)

In the meantime, we’d like to share Marty’s perspective, in her own words, about how to approach the college search. It’s a perspective she recently shared with our friends in the Southern Association for College Admission Counseling, and one that we invited her to share with you. (Thanks Marty! ihrtluhc)

We trust you will find it equal part wise, calming, and invigorating. You may even find some surprises in it.

If I made a bumper sticker for how to approach the college search process it would read: College: It’s About the Journey, Not the Destination. Too often, students will race through their secondary school years, compiling tallies of courses and AP credits completed, joining activities to lengthen their resume, taking and retaking SAT and ACT tests and always keeping one eye on the prize of the college destination. These same students arrive at college only to repeat this process with a goal of admission to graduate and professional school or the perfect first job. We live in a goal-focused society where becoming a mindful, life-long learner, instead of an educational trophy hunter is not an easily achieved state of mind. If I had the magic wand for education, my wish would be that students might approach the college search, as well as their day-to-day learning, with a greater appreciation for the long view: it is not about the race to the end, but instead what you learn from each step in the journey to get there!

Too often the college search begins with a flawed approach by using ranking lists that tout the entering class statistics, rather than focusing on what happens during the four years students are enrolled. The late author Loren Pope, of Looking Beyond the Ivy League and Colleges That Change Lives, often known as the “Ralph Nader” of college admissions, said that choosing colleges based on the entering statistics of the freshmen class is like choosing a hospital based on the health of those in the ER—it’s the treatment that really matters; in the case of college, it’s what happens between the first year and graduation. Researching colleges based on student outcomes will highlight many colleges that outperform the Ivies and Name Brands but don’t have the benefit of name recognition. The research from the Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium on the Undergraduate Origins of Ph.Ds finds lesser known colleges listed in the top ten in various categories of producers of future Ph.Ds, often ahead of the usual suspects.

If you had to choose a spouse or partner for life, would you like to use a publication ranking them by income, IQ scores, and reputation as reported by others who have never met the person? As a culture, we love consulting consumer guidebooks and lists for a shortcut method to choosing electronics and cars; the college search requires a more thoughtful, personal and time consuming approach. It can’t be reduced to rankings with numerical values when it requires starting with who the individual student is and why they are going to college, their needs and desires, and learning styles and interests. This self inventory is the start for finding colleges that “fit” for the individual, instead of starting with the assumption that only the “Top 20” on the USNWR and other rankings lists have any value. These ranking guides sell big, but their value (or lack of it) in the college search process can certainly be diminished if students, parents and counselors go after fit, rather than name recognition. Students and their anxious, hovering parents would do well to add some lesser-known colleges to their search process, where the chance for gaining admission is greater and the outcomes the same or better than those colleges admitting a fraction of applicants.

NSSE: The National Survey of Student Engagement is a wonderful resource for gathering information about college outcomes and provides a list of the right questions to ask during the college search. Most importantly, how quickly students engage in the academic and co-curricular life of the campus will make the difference, not only in their early success as an undergraduate, but in on-time degree completion and in reaching their goals beyond college.

The current weakened state of the economy and worry over the cost of attending a four-year college has made the option of attending community college and transferring to complete the bachelor degree a very appealing one. It can be a positive experience if a student chooses it because it is a good fit for them and not just because it will save them money. Community colleges have changed dramatically since their rapid growth in the 1960s, when because of their “open admissions” policies, they were too often erroneously labeled as options only for those with no other college choice. This is a much different case today when community colleges attract top high school students with honors programs that rival those at competitive four-year colleges. If students apply the same investigative process in considering a community college as they do with four-year colleges: visiting campus, sitting in on classes, eating a meal, meeting students and professors, they are less likely to feel like they “settled” instead of chose…

Perhaps the Irish poet Yeats had a better idea for that bumper sticker with this quote: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”…

[So, too, we will add, should be your college search.]

 Martha “Marty” O’Connell’s 35-year college admissions career includes posts at large and small colleges, beginning with Rutgers University in New Jersey and ending with McDaniel College in Westminster, MD. In July 2006 she began her role as Executive Director of the non-profit organization, Colleges That Change Lives, Inc., which has a mission to advance and support a student-centered college search process that looks beyond the college rankings industry.

(For the record, we think she is awesome.)

I am posting to Admissions@Lawrence with some trepidation after my colleague, Andrea Hendrickson, wrote such a beautiful piece last week about how to tell colleges you’ve decided to go elsewhere. (If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to do so. It’s a gem.)

I feel like a museum curator, who, charged with relocating the “Mona Lisa,” has replaced it with “Dogs Playing Poker.”

The following is one of those more utilitarian pieces you would expect to see pop up just two days before the National Candidates Reply Date. (That’s May 1, for those of you who haven’t circled, underlined, drawn stars around it—or all of the above—on your calendar.)

Repeating a theme we have addressed here often: the liberal arts, it turns out, are in demand by employers. Our friends at the Association of American Colleges & Universities* recently released a report digesting their findings from a national survey of 318 business and non-profit leaders: It Takes More than a Major: Employer Priorities for College Learning and Student Success

*Bias alert: AAC&U is a nearly 100-year-old organization dedicated to supporting liberal arts education.

You can probably tell where this is going…

Here are a few key findings:

1. Nearly all the employers surveyed (93%) say that a “demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than a candidate’s undergraduate major.”
2. In addition to those three capacities, more than 90% of those surveyed believe it’s important to hire people that demonstrate ethical judgment and integrity, intercultural skills, and the capacity for continued new learning.
3. This one we really like: When read a description of a 21st-century liberal education, 74% would recommend this kind of education to a young person they know as the best way to prepare for success in today’s global economy.
   • That description, by the way, says: “This approach to a college education provides both broad knowledge in a variety of areas of study and knowledge in a specific major or field of interest. It also helps students develop a sense of social responsibility, as well as intellectual and practical skills that span all areas of study, such as communication, analytical, and problem-solving skills, and a demonstrated ability to apply knowledge and skills in real-world settings.” (We don’t know what the other descriptions read like, so it’s difficult to judge what the comparisons were, but we’re heartened that employers value this type of experience.)

The takeaway?

How about, “Huzzah for the Liberal Arts?”

Which, come to think of it, would have been a better title for this post… if I were posting it in the late 1500s, which is when you may have been more likely to hear an occasional “huzzah!”

As if the college decision process isn’t hard enough already…

You’ve spent at least a year compiling and editing a list of colleges, visiting, filling out applications, writing essays, waiting (ugh, the WAITING), filing out the FAFSA, waiting again, and now you have all (or mostly all) of your admit letters and financial aid awards in front of you. You’re weighing the pros and cons, or just out-right submitting a deposit to the one you know you’ve been waiting to enroll at since you visited.

All that’s left is to tell the other colleges who accepted you what you’ve decided. And it’s harder than you thought it would be.

Why? Not because colleges make it difficult to respond. You are getting a near-constant stream of emails, letters, calls, and postcards asking about your plans: check this box, respond to this email, unsubscribe (and we’ll get the picture)…

It’s hard because while we—the colleges, and the admissions counselors—were getting to know you, you got to know us. You found out that admissions counselors are people—exceedingly cool people. Maybe we’ve met half-a-dozen times over the last year. Maybe we have things in common (like obsessions with The Walking Dead or Macklemore). When someone spends time with you, connects with you, advocates for you in the admissions committee, it’s hard not to feel bad saying, “thanks, but no thanks.”

Don’t feel bad. Not even a little.

Whether or not you choose our institution, you are going to end up where you are meant to be. That’s all we want for you. That’s all any admissions counselor at any institution really wants for you. So don’t be afraid to tell us your plans. Fill out that card, respond to that email, reach out.

Our huge and heartfelt congratulations (plus a happy dance) on your college decision!

If you’ve been cruising around the Lawrence website anytime in the last, you know, several years, you may have grown accustomed to the way things were laid out around here. (Our university webmistress—who, in our opinion, is made of magic—likes to refer to it as a baroque castle with a lot of things bolted onto it.)

On March 20, 2013 at 8:15 a.m. that all changed when the new Lawrence.edu launched.

Deep breath.

It’s different.

But here’s the thing. We trust it’s going to be an easier to navigate experience. We also trust that, since it is new, it’s not yet 100% perfect. We realize there are still a lot of places where we will put images to make your experience an attractive one. Our main concern is ensuring that the site itself is useful.

And here’s where we could use your help. If you run into anything less than useful (including, heaven forbid, typos), let us know. You can post a comment to this blog, and we’ll receive notice right away and, more important, get to work making your experience a better one.

Thank you. And happy browsing.

“Wait a minute, isn’t Lawrence a private college?” asks the astute reader with a scrunched-up facial expression signaling confusion and/or discomfort on behalf of the headline writer.

Yes, Lawrence is a private college, which is why we will move very quickly from a provocative headline to nine reasons the nine reasons in the headline require closer scrutiny. (The repetition in the previous sentence is intentional.) The good news is that someone already did it for us. Therefore, in true Lawrence University fashion, we will invoke our honor code and cite our source: the National Association of Independent Colleges & Universities, an organization that, as the name indicates, represents private (nonprofit) colleges. NAICU recently published Nine Myths About Private Nonprofit Higher Education, which addresses each with nine evidence-backed truths overturning some widely shared, and often uncritically accepted “facts”, including this one:

• Private college students typically graduate with $100,000 in debt. News and opinion pieces often reach for the stars when they want a detail to support the point that private college is expensive. But here’s the truth: 3.1% of private college graduates leave with more than $100,000 in loans. (Hardly typical.) In fact, 11.5% have debt exceeding $50,000. The average debt load—and we’ll admit it’s not by any means small or insignificant—is just under $30,000, which, by the way isn’t much more than the average debt load of a public school graduate, as you’ll see in the article.

There are eight other gems in NAICU’s well-researched and well-supported article. We encourage you to consider them as you consider Lawrence University along with other private colleges.

…and by the number 3.14159.

Yep: that’s 3.14 pies served up at 1:59 p.m., because that’s how we do things here in the Lawrence admissions office. (Time purists will insist that we technically served the pies at 13:59, but it would have been a lonely party 12 hours ago.)

Score one more for the liberal arts.

In a story last week on Marketplace (a business-oriented American Public Media radio show that runs daily on NPR), we were presented with yet another argument for why the liberal arts and sciences are as relevant as ever in this economy.

The story centers on the results of a survey conducted by Maguire & Associates on behalf of Marketplace and The Chronicle of Higher Education. They contacted 700 employers who express general frustration with how colleges are preparing their students for the world of work: “Nearly a third said colleges are doing a ‘fair’ to ‘poor’ job of producing ‘successful employees.’ Despite persistently high unemployment, more than half of the employers said they had trouble finding qualified candidates for job openings.”

And what makes a “successful employee,” at least among those 700 employers in the survey group? (SPOILER: The answer is the kind that makes those of us who work at liberal arts colleges feel even more confident that what we offer is relevant, practical, and necessary. [Prospective students and parents, please take note.])

“We find that a lot of people, and not just new college grads, people that are coming from a career, aren’t getting that skill set,” Boyes [an employer interviewed in the story] says. “How you put an idea forward, and how do you support it, how do you build it, how do you put the facts behind it? All of those things are really critical.”

Boyes sounds like a lot of the employers who responded to our survey. More than half of them said they have trouble finding qualified people for job openings. They said recent grads too often don’t know how to communicate effectively. And they have trouble adapting, problem solving and making decisions – things employers say they should have learned in college.

That’s why everyone Boyes hires goes through a year-long training program. “The company puts probably about a quarter of a million dollars into every single new hire,” Boyes says. “But that’s the kind of value that we get out of it.”

The training covers basics – like how to write an effective business document – and throws in some philosophy and history

“We ask people to read Cato the Elder,” Boyes says. “We ask people to read Suetonius.”

Jobseekers, take note: you better brush up on your on your early Roman history.

“We do that because we ask them to look at the process – the abstract process – of organizing ideas,” Boyes says.

Sounds a lot like an argument for liberal arts education, at a time when more students are being told to study science and technology as a path to a career. Maguire Associates, the firm that conducted the survey, says the findings suggest colleges should break down the “false dichotomy of liberal arts and career development,” saying they’re “intrinsically linked.”

Or, as Boyes puts it: “We don’t need mono-focused people. We need well-rounded people.” And that’s from a tech employer.

Yesterday, we left you with a cliffhanger. Today, the start of an answer.

It has always been the particular challenge of a liberal arts and sciences program to answer the question “What can you do with it?” The question has become increasingly pointed in an economy that continues continues to sputter, joblessness remains woefully high, and, college costs continue to rise. The problem has been exacerbated by legislators (Democrats and Republicans alike) that often equate “college education” with “professional preparation”.  The Obama administration’s drive to put the United States back on top of the list of nations with the highest percentages of college degree holders by 2020 illustrates this. (We’re not even in the top 10, according to the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development.)

But there’s more to college education and professional preparation than just holding a degree.

It is necessary to have a well-trained, technically proficient citizenry. We need engineers, scientists, accountants, developers and others who can solve problems. But we also need people in these professions to be able to explain to others how they solved the problems. More important they need to teach others how to solve them for themselves. Purely vocational training likely will not get you all the way there. Strong writing, speaking and thinking skills can separate the merely good problem-solver from the great ones.

But limiting the discussion to the world of work is only part of the story. What of our lives outside our jobs?

What about being an informed citizen, one who can say not only what she believes, but make a compelling case for why she believes it?

What about being a critical consumer of information, one who is less likely to believe something just because it’s coming from an “authority,” like a newspaper, a news program, a blog, a politician, or even a professor.

The liberal arts and sciences can play an important role in developing the whole person—professionally and personally.

In a landmark study, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa attempt to address a variety of questions about the amount and type of learning occurring in American colleges, based on a five-year longitudinal study of 2,300 students on 24 diverse campuses. One of the questions they address—are students improving their critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills during college?—finds a positive correlation between academic rigor and the amount of gains seen in the development of this set of skills. Their Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) used performance tasks and holistic assessments (instead of surveys) to measure not only what students know, but what they don’t know.

In the study, students in the liberal arts and sciences fared far better than their peers in professional programs like business, engineering, communications, education and health. One of their hypotheses, according to Arum at a recent address to more than 100 college enrollment officials, is that the traditional arts and sciences is where the most academic rigor and, as a result, the most learning occurs, largely because of their heavier requirements for reading, writing, and intensive study—three activities that tend to be more independent endeavors. The study finds that students who spent, on average, more hours of independent study per week during college fared far better than those who spent, on average more hours in group study with peers during their college careers.

An interesting side note to the study is that those students who spent more time studying independently were also far more likely to read print or online news daily, and to discuss politics and public affairs.

So back to that question: “What can you do with the liberal arts and sciences?”

In an uncertain world, where the commonplace idea is that the most in-demand jobs ten years from now don’t yet exist, being a nimble, flexible, adaptive learner equipped with finely tuned reading, writing, speaking and thinking skills can be advantageous. A liberal arts and sciences curriculum can prepare you for your first job (though vocational experiences like internships will undoubtedly enhance that preparation). Perhaps more important, a liberal arts and sciences curriculum should prepare you for all of the jobs you’ll have after that.

And lest we pigeonhole ourselves merely as workers, a liberal arts and sciences curriculum can broaden the skills essential to a meaningful life outside the world of work. Such as being able to detect when a “man is talking rot.”

Or, as Andrew Delbanco, cultural critic and author of College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be, said in an address in 2012: “You’re going to spend the rest of your life inside your head. You may as well make it an interesting place to be.”

From the archives… we ran this last year at this time. It seems fitting to do so again this year.

Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.

—John Alexander Smith, 1914

Even though it was nearly a century ago when John Alexander Smith, a University of Oxford professor of moral philosophy, opened his course with this counterintuitive utterance, the core of his message is as essential today as it was not only then, but for centuries before that.

Today you’ll find few people calling out someone for “talking rot”. (Using an anachronism like that is a quick way to get an eye-roll.) However, the ability to identify shaded truth, logical fallacies, slanted rhetoric, even demagoguery—in other words, the ability to think critically—remains one of the most important things an education should develop and sharpen.

It’s something liberal arts and sciences programs—either liberal arts colleges (like Lawrence University or Williams College) or liberal arts core curricula at some comprehensive universities (like Marquette or Notre Dame)—have been doing for generations. The liberal arts had been around long before these academic upstarts started delivering them. Since the time of the Roman Empire, the liberal arts were those things studied by free persons—grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, music, astronomy—as opposed to the manual skills studied by slaves.

You might recognize their allegorized images (below) from their class picture, painted in the late 16^th century by Flemish painter, Maarten de Vos.

Today’s liberal arts and sciences typically comprise the arts and humanities (like literature, languages, philosophy, history, fine/performing arts) and sciences (math, natural and social science).

A liberal arts and sciences education tests our ability to investigate and understand the nature of an organism, the application of a theory, the behavior of a crowd, the principles of a political system, the meaning of a poem, the causes of an event, the consequences of an argument, or the composition of a symphony.

At its best, the study of the liberal arts and sciences develops the abilities to find similarities among dissimilar things, common ground among the uncommon, meaning in the midst of meaninglessness. It can transform one—as David Burrows, provost of Lawrence University, often says—from “merely reflecting the light of others to generating one’s own light.”

“Sure. That’s the nice stuff you find in college admissions brochures,” people will often challenge. “But will it help you get a job?”

We’ll take up that challenge tomorrow. (Rest assured; we have an answer.)

Note: A long (really long) version of this appeared in an article I wrote for the American Society of Quality in June 2011. IHRTLUHC on myself, I suppose.

We hear that from time to time.

If you are ready to join the Lawrence community for the coming fall, and wish to pay your $400 tuition deposit online, you might find the following steps helpful to guide you:

• Log into your Voyager account.
• Select the link, Your Account, and you will be whisked off to the “Student Account Online” page. [If prompted to log in again, use the same information you used to log into your Voyager account.]
• Once you successfully get into the Student Account Online, you will see a page that looks like this (presumably without all the same apps on the toolbar):

• On this page, find the Items for Purchase box. It’s the third box down in the left column.
• Select Tuition Deposit, and you’ll get to a page that looks like this:

• Select Accept Admission $400 (we’re thinking positively here).
• Select Add to Shopping Cart
• The rest should be familiar to you if you’ve conducted a credit card transaction online.
• Note: if you find the $11 service charge distasteful (we’re not too thrilled about it ourselves), you can either
  • submit through the same system the e-check/electronic funds transfer, for which there is no fee (woohoo!)
  • submit your deposit the good old-fashioned way by dropping (1) a check along with your (2) confirmation of enrollment card into the Business Reply Mail envelope we sent with your offer of admission.

Rest assured that Lawrence University is way more user-friendly than this process might otherwise suggest.