Why a Small Liberal Arts College Could Be Your Kid's Best Choice
by Joy Castro

Why I’m Totally Biased When I Talk About This
I came from a background of food stamps, trailer parks, and government cheese; no one in my family had gone to college. For me, attending a small liberal arts school was a fluke—I was lucky enough to get a scholarship, which I supplemented with work-study (as a campus security guard—great uniform) and waitressing (not-so-great uniform). It’s true that I was a little freaked out by the manicured grounds and the kids my age who drove Volvos, traveled Europe, and hosted cocaine parties. Working-class disorientation, I learned later, isn’t uncommon. Author Russell Banks (The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction), the son and grandson of plumbers, ran away from Colgate University in the middle of the night—despite his scholarship—because he was so weirded out by the culture gap. Pomona College professor John Seery, the author of America Goes to College: Political Theory for the Liberal Arts, was a working-class, truck-driving, first-generation college student from Iowa’s farm country. He still remembers the profound strangeness of arriving with callused hands at prestigious Amherst College, which was then a sea of khakis.
But more stunning than the culture shock, for me, were the classes and professors. I was dazzled by the demand that I think, and talk, and by the fact that my thoughts mattered. I fell in love with learning. Professors took the time to talk with us, and we were encouraged to pursue our own research interests (in a biology course, I wrote my final paper on the evolutionary purpose of the female orgasm). Like Viramontes’s professors, mine made it all so real, so relevant, and so human. I learned political science from a guy who’d shot boar with Nikita Kruschev. When one literature course had just six students, we met in the office of the distinguished British professor, who served us biscuits and tea. When, as a junior, I gave birth to my son Grey, the distinguished professor sent flowers to the hospital.
Not long after Grey was born, another professor, Laura White, pulled me aside after class one day to ask me what I wanted to do with my life. I was clueless, but I felt desperate to start supporting us as quickly as possible.
“Have you ever thought about grad school?� she asked. I didn’t know exactly what grad school was. But she encouraged me, arranging a one-on-one tutorial that had us meeting each week for four months to discuss literature—at her house, where she also wove in details about being a grad school mom herself: nursing her daughter while reading Jane Austen, typing papers with a baby in her lap. Opening her home and her private life as a role model, she made it real, and she made it seem increasingly possible for me. She was a busy professor juggling teaching, publishing, and family; she didn’t have to take the time and effort to nurture a stray. But she did.
It’s the kind of story you’ll hear again and again about the faculty at small liberal arts schools, and it’s why, after I finished my doctorate, I chose to teach at one. My classes are small, and I work one-on-one with students. I invite them to my house for dinner, take them to state parks and art museums, drive them to LGBT conferences and Black Studies conferences in other states, and hug their moms at graduation. When they slouch moodily in the back of the classroom, I ask them how things are going. When they can’t afford to fly home for Thanksgiving, they come to our house.
Here and at other small campuses, my liberal arts colleagues take an amazingly involved interest in the lives of their students, who flourish as a result. It’s the kind of place I want Grey to go someday.

But is it Practical?
Most parents, after all, want their children to grow up to be 1) happy, and 2) employed—at something meaningful, if possible. Our economy is unstable; a lot of us are poor. Some argue that the focus of higher ed should be vocational, that it should prepare our kids to earn a living wage. In this context, “liberal arts� can sound frivolous, a very expensive and ultimately useless way to spend four years (especially since some people mistakenly take “liberal arts� to mean either leftist or artsy-fartsy, or both—which some schools are, bless them, but that’s not what it means). John Seery believes “that liberal arts college education goes largely unappreciated, not mainly because the nation’s employers routinely disparage the untrained ‘liberal arts graduate,’ but because the nature and purpose of the liberal arts are often poorly understood and therefore falsely derided.�
It’s true. Most employers and parents won’t use the term “liberal arts,� points out Hubert Maultsby, a dean at Norwich University in Vermont, but they all want their new hires or their kids to be able to do things that liberal arts schools nurture: be problem solvers, serve their communities, use technology comfortably, collaborate well, and keep developing their values and ethics.
In answer to critics who see the residential liberal arts approach as irrelevant, impractical, or outdated, I’d note such achievers as Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, and has been widely praised for his work in peace, development, and human rights. He attended Macalester College in St. Paul, as did acclaimed Vietnam author Tim O’Brien (The Things They Carried), whose experimental fiction is read in colleges around the country. There’s Williams College graduate Bethany MacLean, the journalist who blew the whistle on Enron—her liberal arts background, she claims, wouldn’t let her rest when the numbers didn’t add up. Union College grad R. Gordon Gould invented the laser. Kenyon College’s alumni include actors Paul Newman (known for his social activism and line of organic foods) and Allison Janney (who plays C.J., the smart, gutsy press secretary on West Wing who’s been called “the thinking man’s sex symbol�).
Oberlin College, a little school in the middle of Ohio’s cornfields, produced not only Liz Phair but also Eric Bogosian, the playwright, actor, novelist, and winner of three Obie Awards for his solo shows and Jane Pratt, creator of the feminist magazines Sassy and Jane. Discussing her years at Oberlin, Pratt says, “There's so much I learned there about priorities, about looking at the big picture. I mean, money doesn't motivate me, fame . . . none of that stuff is interesting to me. What's interesting is really feeling like I have a message and wanting to get that out, and I feel like that came very much from Oberlin.� A liberal arts education nurtures success across a broad variety of fields.
Alumnae of Mt. Holyoke, the college with the kosher/halal dining hall, include Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwrights Wendy Wasserstein (The Heidi Chronicles) and Suzan-Lori Parks, whose play Topdog/Underdog currently stars Jeffrey Wright and Mos Def on Broadway. Graduates of Trinity University, a small liberal arts school in San Antonio, include writer, educator, and international arts ambassador Naomi Shihab Nye, art museum curator Jill Chancey, and Ian Billick, the director of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, where scientists come from all over the world to do field research.
“My entire career is one of community service,� says Bethann Witcher, now in her fifties. Witcher, who attended Kalamazoo College in Michigan, has led nutrition and leadership programs for indigenous women in the Andes and worked with liberation educator Paulo Freire and Mexican-American migrant farmers. As a program director for Global Health Action, she ran leadership programs for doctors and nurses in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, South America, and the U.S. Today she develops health programs in Atlanta’s inner-city African-American churches.

Most institutions, she regrets, fail to educate people for independent
thinking. “One of America’s greatest problems in education is a focus on
testing, the regurgitation of information,� she says, “rather than on
students’ abilities to think critically and to profoundly analyze the
world around them.� A liberal arts mode that’s “learner-centered,
problem-solving, self-discovering, and action-producing,� she argues,
“stimulates critical thinking and creativity, which should be the goals of
education.� Jill Chancey, a Mississippi art museum curator who graduated from Trinity, agrees: “It was in college that I learned to ask questions and think skeptically and critically, a hugely important skill no matter what you’re doing.�
Presidents and CEOs of 30 of some of Canada’s biggest hi-tech companies (AT&T Canada, IBM Canada) issued a signed testimonial on the practical value of a liberal arts education in the April 8, 2000 issue of the Toronto Globe and Mail. “Our companies function in a state of constant flux,� they wrote. “To prosper, we need creative thinkers at all levels of the enterprise who are comfortable dealing with decisions in the bigger context.�
Technical experts remain necessary, they noted, but hi-tech executives are looking specifically for employees who are “able to communicate—to reason, create, write and speak�—skills they saw coming from liberal arts graduates, who bring a “level of cultural and civic literacy� to big business. And Fast Company, a business magazine focused on innovation and ethics, recently profiled Alverno College, a Catholic women’s liberal arts college in Milwaukee, calling it a model for executives who want their companies to become more focused on learning—and thus more able to innovate quickly. For skeptics interested only in the bottom line, I’d point to the roughly 40% of Fortune 500 CEOs who hold liberal-arts degrees.
Ian Billick’s experience offers evidence that liberal arts schools prepare graduates to move flexibly into new fields. As an undergraduate at Trinity, he double-majored in math and physics and was the president of the student government—all interesting stuff, but nothing with a direct link to his current work directing a wilderness biology lab. “Perhaps the biggest thing I got out of Trinity,� he reflects, “was the ability and motivation to learn on my own. The other thing I developed was a willingness to learn and pursue any subject, something that’s necessary for a job like mine.� The opportunity to participate fully in extracurricular activities turned out to be just as important. “Actually, my time in student government was very helpful in preparing for my current job,� he says. “I learned how to interact with people, how to manage a budget, how to do all the things that an administrator needs to do.�

Getting You Where You Live
When asked what he valued most during his four years at Trinity, Ian Billick answers, “My friends.� When asked what he values most now, fifteen years after graduation, he replies again, “My friends.� His experience isn’t unusual.

The unique thing small liberal arts schools offer is relationships: relationships among students, among students and professors, and among students and staff (coaches, financial aid officers, librarians). Both in and out of the classroom, this focus on relationship works well with what educational theorists now understand as the most effective way of learning.
Old concepts of how people learn—like old concepts of parenting—saw the student/child as passive, a blank slate: the learner was considered to be empty, and the teacher-authority filled the learner with knowledge. (This theory worked pretty well to justify big lecture classes, with the professor in the front as expert and the students as silent, dutiful note-takers.)
But learning theorists see things differently today. Lee Shulman, president of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Carnegie is the oldest education think-tank in the country), argues that “learning is basically an interplay of two challenging processes—getting knowledge that is inside [the learner] to move out, and getting knowledge that is outside to move in�—in other words, dialogue. Students learn best when they can share their ideas and perceptions with others, testing and evaluating those ideas based on the feedback of teachers and peers. “In a setting where serious activity and/or discussion is possible,� Shulman adds, “knowledge is enriched and elaborated by social interactions with people who have also experienced their own processes of getting what’s inside out�—that is, with other actively engaged students. A teacher in a small classroom, moreover, is best equipped to assess the current state of each learner’s knowledge and to challenge him or her to further insights. “I know firsthand,� William Durden writes, “that no existing form of distance learning can similarly affirm students as individuals and also force them to acknowledge the ideas of others.�
Begun in Paris in 1180, the idea of college residentiality continues to have a major impact on education, because the bonds made by living on campus make a huge difference in people’s experience of college. Students form a 24/7 community that amplifies, modifies, and makes real the learning that happens in class. Noting that he lived on campus in a dormitory all four years, Ian Billick explains, “I am essentially a lazy person. Living on campus was very easy. It was also nice to be socially involved. I remember that it was really nice to be able to focus on work and then effortlessly step into a social scene.�
Jill Chancey, a member of that scene, is now an art museum curator in
Mississippi. When asked what she values most, she notes critical thinking
as
being the most important skill she learned but still ranks “lasting friendships� first. “I can be entirely myself with college friends,� she says, “because they’ve all seen me in all modes and already know all of my dark secrets.� Bethann Witcher, the healthcare worker in Atlanta, notes that she tried living at home for her first quarter at Kalamazoo, which “didn’t work. I moved into the dorm after that,� she recalls. “I think residentiality is of great value for college students. It allows young adults to begin to be on their own, to fend for themselves within a safe environment.�
“Me and my roommate Deena, our room looked like a brothel. I don't know what we were thinking!� recalls Jane Pratt, founder of Jane and Sassy. “We had, like, peacock feathers on the ceiling, tapestries on every surface.� Despite crediting Oberlin for her current priorities and abilities, she acknowledges: “You know it's funny, when I remember Oberlin, I just don't remember the classes at all. I just remember all the social interaction.�

Rather than seeing this kind of out-of-class learning as a threat, liberal arts educators welcome it, recognizing that it’s some of the most valuable learning that occurs. Whether students realize it or not, social interaction is where the book-learning and lab-learning become personally meaningful, where it becomes incorporated into the real intellectual life of each individual student. Out-of-class learning is considered so valuable that architects even build in what they call “serendipitous space,� like lounges, for students to crash and talk.
Colleges often build on this social energy by planning core courses that involve hundreds of students at once, so everyone will be reading the same thing at the same time in small discussion groups. As an undergraduate, I talked with my friends for hours about things we were learning in Human Quest, a core course. We argued about whether Castiglione’s courtly concept of sprezzatura (training hard to do something perfectly but then pretending that you hadn’t practiced at all) was way cool or a cruddy, dishonest way to make uneducated people feel inferior. This guy named Bruce—now a paleobotanist—used to do headstands in the dorm lounge while discoursing on the Hegelian dialectic. On long night walks around the city, my friends and I would argue about how to live, debating the merits of kibbutzes, communes, solar energy, polyamory, organic farming, and the social order of Plato’s Republic. We drank, fooled around, and goofed off, but our conversations engaged serious material, not sitcoms we’d all watched.
At the school where I teach, a similar course is required of all sophomores, so a large proportion of our small campus—organized in small discussion groups—has an intense intellectual experience in common. A student reading Wordsworth, Zora Neale Hurston, or the UN Declaration of Human Rights has plenty of students or professors to talk with. Students talk about the course at lunch, at dinner, in other courses—and they remember it after graduation as one of the best experiences at the college.
Other schools focus such courses specifically on important aspects of their mission and student body. Spelman College in Atlanta, for example, a historically Black college for women, requires all students to take African Diaspora and the World, a two-semester, interdisciplinary program that’s informed by gender studies. At the College of St. Catherine, a Catholic liberal arts school for women in St. Paul, all entering students take a course called The Reflective Woman, which includes readings by Virginia Woolf, Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker, and bell hooks.
A few colleges rely completely on such core course experiences. The whole curriculum at St. John’s College, for example, centers on an established list of texts, which all students read and discuss in small groups at the same time. Philosopher John MacFarlane, who left Harvard to attend St. John’s, remembers liking “the sense of community you got from having three hundred people who were doing exactly the same curriculum. There was a sense of common purpose that you don't get on regular campuses. The students also had a lot in common to talk about, intellectually, because they were reading the same things. That was something I missed at Harvard.� Residentiality, he notes, “fosters a lot of interaction with other students, some of it intellectual, all of it valuable.�
At St. John’s, which MacFarlane describes as “a little monastic environment,� he found that the discussion groups were small, intense, and focused on active student learning. “Two faculty members (called ‘tutors,’ since they don't ‘profess’) presided, but their contribution was generally limited to asking an opening question and intervening from time to time to steer the conversation in a fruitful direction,� he recalls. “So it was pretty much up to us to get something interesting out of these texts. The first month or so, the discussions were awful. Then, finally, we got the hang of it: working together as a group, asking the right questions, interrogating the texts for the answers.�

The impact was transforming. “It was amazing how it came together sometimes,� he remembers. “I'd come out with some entirely new insight into the text (and, sometimes, into life)—an insight that was far more precious to us than anything we could have learned in a lecture, because we hammered it out ourselves. Often these discussions would continue into the night, informally.�

Show Me the Money
Because liberal arts schools still have the reputation of being elite and expensive, lots of qualified students don’t even apply. But the cool thing is that small colleges, feeling the competition from other kinds of institutions, are responding by putting together potentially huge financial aid packages for disadvantaged students. In his Chronicle column, William Durden notes that just at the moment that “more and more disadvantaged youth are ready for college,� many “liberal-arts colleges are poised to make it possible for them to attend in unprecedented numbers through financial aid and heightened recruitment efforts.�
So don’t be stunned by sticker shock when tuition and housing costs run as high as $30,000 a year on paper. The school where I teach, for example, promises to meet 100% of demonstrated need (through grants, scholarships, loans, and work-study) for all students who are accepted. High-cost schools often have generous endowments that fund a lot of aid, so what looks like an impossible amount can actually be very feasible for low-income or lower-middle-income families.
Each school is different, and it’s worth having a conversation with the financial aid officer at each one to find out exactly what you can expect. Fortunately, most financial aid workers at small schools are helpful people who want to find a way to make it work, and they’ll be straight with you if it can’t. Also, talk realistically with your son or daughter about whether they’ll be willing to live with debt after college. Student loan debt sucks, but work you love and a decent salary can make it a bearable price to pay.

Be Sure to Check . . .

. . . the mission statements of the colleges you’re interested in. Mission statements are short, capsule-form distillations of the philosophy that informs the college’s daily life; you can usually find them on websites or in the college’s academic bulletin.
While the great thing about small colleges is that they care about the students as whole people, including their social, civic, and ethical development, the tricky thing is making sure that the college’s idea of ethical development agrees with yours and your kid’s. There’s a huge variety, and you’d want to make sure that your son or daughter will be accepted, respected, and comfortable. Many institutions prioritize racial and ethnic diversity, or internationalization, or community service/activism, and they put their money where their mouth is—hiring faculty of color, for example, or funding innovative programs that get students into different communities via faculty-led off-campus trips. A number of residential schools have religious missions or affiliations, and some are more restrictive than others. There are left-wing schools, right-wing schools, and middle-of-the-road schools. Many of them will look similar: they’ll all tend to have small classes, successful alumni, and some professors trained at Harvard.
So be active in evaluating the environment. Read all the materials, and definitely go check out the campus. Get a feel for how people treat each other and what kinds of courses are offered (and not offered). Scope out bulletin boards to see what kinds of student-organized extra-curriculars are popular (yoga, Wiccans, Young Republicans) and which ideologies seem to predominate.
Most institutions take their missions seriously, incorporating the principles of their mission statements into the daily life of the college. The kosher/halal dining hall at Mt. Holyoke, for example, draws on the school’s long history of religious pluralism. At Quaker-founded Earlham College in Indiana, everyday practice is informed by the Quakers’ historical allegiance to peace activism, justice, simplicity, and governance by consensus. There’s a degree program in Peace Studies, and class discussion (which at many schools can get raucous) sometimes incorporates thoughtful silence, a hallmark of Quaker life.
Even secular colleges tend to focus on values and ethics, which—post-Enron, post-WorldCom—may not be a bad thing. Wabash College, where I teach, has been secular since its founding, but its non-sectarian mission statement still emphasizes the ability to “act responsibly� and “live humanely.�
Alexander Astin’s study found clear differences in the academic and ideological outcomes of different kinds of liberal arts colleges. Independent schools—those with no religious affiliation—have a positive impact on students’ writing skills, cultural awareness, and scores on the MCAT, the admissions test to med school. Students at independent schools also tend to have higher levels of cultural awareness and to participate in protests more than their peers at other kinds of liberal arts schools. They also tend to be more artistic, more feminist, and less materialistic. At independent colleges, both the student body and the faculty tend to be politically liberal.
Religious institutions, on the other hand, tend to display “an entirely different pattern,� Astin says. Students at Roman Catholic colleges, for example, tend to get better grades and to be more supportive of institutional authority. At Protestant colleges, students are more likely to join a sorority or fraternity and get lower scores on the MCAT, and the student body as well as the faculty is more likely to be politically conservative.
For African-American students, historically Black colleges seem to offer the best of all worlds. They have a positive impact on a number of different factors, including grade point average, intellectual self-esteem, attendance at arts events, participation in protests, tutoring other students, and graduating with honors.
But these are just generalizations, and exceptions exist—like Helena Viramontes’s experience at Immaculate Heart, a Catholic institution, which taught her to question authority and be active in the world.

Each college is different. Find out.

The Model for All Colleges
“I like the intellectual energy and the undiscriminating curiosity that attend a liberal arts environment,� writes John Seery. “I like the inquisitiveness here, the hard work, the talk and debate, and the fact that there are a myriad of stories, lives, and memories in the making.� Experts who study higher education agree.
In a decades-long study, UCLA professor Alexander Astin compared small liberal arts colleges to other kinds of institutions such as community colleges, public four-year colleges, and large research universities. He found that their combination of smallness, residentiality, and close faculty-student interaction led to significantly better experiences for students. Students at liberal arts colleges also report greater satisfaction with the faculty and the quality of teaching, and a liberal arts student is more likely than her counterparts at any other kind of institution to complete her bachelor’s degree, be elected to student office, and see her college as being focused on social change. Convinced by the results of his own study, Astin still teaches at UCLA, a major research university, but now argues that all American colleges and universities should model themselves on the small residential liberal arts college.
In 1998, The Boyer Commission published the influential report “Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities.� It argued that the education of undergraduates is in crisis at major research universities, where professors are rewarded primarily for research and publication, not for the quality of their undergraduate teaching. It urges research universities to offer student-centered, independent learning and to build communities where students feel known and valued—the things liberal arts colleges already do well.
Small liberal arts colleges are becoming the best choice for a lot of lower-income families. Like attachment parenting or the Slow Food movement, liberal arts colleges value relationship more than efficiency. Like loving parents, they care less about the bottom line than about the health of the whole person—and the world.

Links to liberal arts colleges mentioned in this article:

Alverno College www.alverno.edu (800) 933-3401

Amherst College www.amherst.edu (413) 542-2000

Colgate University www.colgate.edu (315) 228-1000

Dickinson College www.dickinson.edu (717) 243-5121

Earlham College www.earlham.edu (800) 327-5426

Kalamazoo College www.kzoo.edu (800) 253-3602

Kenyon College www.kenyon.edu (800) KENYONC

Macalester College www.macalester.edu (800) 231-7974

Mt. Holyoke College www.mtholyoke.edu (413) 538-2023

Norwich University www.norwich.edu (800) 468-6679

Oberlin College www.oberlin.edu (800) 622-6243

Pomona College www.pomona.edu (909) 621-8134

St. John’s College www.sjcsf.edu (800) 727-9238 Annapolis
(505) 984-6000Santa Fe

College of St. Catherine www.stkate.edu (800) 945-4599

Spelman College www.spelman.edu (800) 932-2411

Trinity University www.trinity.edu (800) TRINITY

Union College www.union.edu (888) 843-6688

Wabash College www.wabash.edu (800) 345-5385

Wheaton College www.wheaton.edu (800) 222-2419

Williams College www.williams.edu (413) 597-2211

Online resources:

The Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University. “Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities.� http://naples.cc.sunysb.edu/Pres/boyer.nsf/

Jane Pratt. Interview with Lauren Viera. The Oberlin Review 126 Oct. 3, 1997. http://www.oberlin.edu/~ocreview/archives/1997.10.03/arts/jane.html

Curtis Sittenfeld, “Think for a Change.� Fast Company 56 March 2002.
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/56/think.html

Joy Castro is the devoted mom of a thirteen-year-old son and a devoted professor of literature, feminist theory, and fiction writing at Wabash College in Indiana. Her fiction appears on the Hip Mama website. Write her at castroj@wabash.edu

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