Three cheers for the liberal arts from a somewhat-less-than-objective-but-interesting-nonetheless source

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!”

Yes, you are seeing things: Lawrence.edu got a makeover

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.

Here are 9 reasons you shouldn’t consider private colleges

“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.

Today’s episode of Sesame Street was brought to you by the letters P and I…

…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.)

What do employers really want from college grads?

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.

Music to our ears. (Pun intended. If you don’t get the pun, remember that we have a conservatory of music paired with our college of liberal arts and sciences.)