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01 November 2005
Strength from Diversity: Independent Higher Education
Private colleges provide diverse educational experiences
By Richard Ekman
Private, four-year colleges provide diverse educational experiences, primarily to undergraduate students. Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, describes what makes private, or independent, colleges different from their counterparts in the public sector.
The most remarkable feature of U.S. higher education is its diversity. The national government does not control the curriculum at U.S. colleges and universities or the methods of teaching, and state governments also exercise a fairly light touch. But it is in the “independent” or “private” sector of higher education where diversity of educational philosophies, programs, and traditions is greatest. Some 600 smaller colleges and universities make up this sector and include many of the United States’ most venerable institutions.
Consider these diverse features: Ursinus College in Pennsylvania offers an interdisciplinary freshman-year program that exposes students to a wide variety of texts in the humanities and social sciences; Warren Wilson College in North Carolina requires all students to share in the manual labor of running the institution and treats this as an important part of the college’s educational philosophy; Northland College in Wisconsin goes to extreme lengths to operate in ways that are sensitive to the environment; Alderson-Broaddus College in West Virginia draws most of its students from very small towns in the West Virginia hills and leads many of them to careers in science and medicine; Earlham College, which was founded by Quakers, is located in Indiana and continues to use consensus among all members of the campus community as its main form of decision-making; Cedar Crest College in Pennsylvania, a college for women, counters the stereotype that women do not excel at science by producing large numbers of science graduates.
These 600 or so independent colleges and universities have, despite their differences, a number of characteristics in common:
• They are fairly small, with enrollments rarely exceeding 3,000 students.
• They are mainly or entirely undergraduate-oriented, with very few graduate programs.
• All faculty members are committed to teaching. Although most also conduct research, they view it as secondary to their teaching duties, and they spend long hours with students in and out of the classroom.
• The methods of teaching are highly interactive and engaged.
• Because these institutions understand that much of the educational process takes place outside the classroom, opportunities for interaction among students and between students and faculty abound, and these are understood to be important parts of the co-curricular dimension of education.
• These institutions are explicit about their underlying values. Sometimes these are the values of the religious denomination that founded the college (or some echo of those values if that denomination now is less deeply involved). Sometimes these values reflect a distinctive educational philosophy, such as the “great books” colleges—of which St. John’s College, with campuses in Maryland and New Mexico, is the best known—or the “work colleges” such as Warren Wilson College or Berea College in Kentucky, where, in addition to their studies, students have assigned duties that help support the school.
• These institutions view study of the liberal arts as essential for responsible citizenship after graduation, no matter what professional training is also acquired.
The format of higher education represented by these schools works exceptionally well. Statistics on degree completion, for example, show that small, private colleges have higher degree-completion rates than bigger state-run universities. Moreover, this difference holds true not only among the most talented students, but also among those that enter with poorer secondary school grades or SAT [http://www.collegeboard.com] scores. Higher degree-completion rates also apply to socioeconomic groups that are sometimes associated with low college-participation rates, such as students who are the first generation in their family to go to college, students who must work full-time in addition to attending class, or students from various minority groups.
The explanation for the comparative effectiveness of the smaller private institutions can be found in the “engaged learning” that takes place at these institutions. George Kuh, the founder of the National Survey of Student Engagement (in which hundreds of colleges and universities participate), notes that success in college is closely correlated with getting to know a professor; getting involved in an extracurricular activity; working at a community-based internship; and being enrolled in classes in which active pedagogies dominate, such as classes that require oral reports and frequent written papers. These characteristics are more likely to be found at smaller institutions than at large ones.
Smaller, independent institutions can be found throughout the United States, in major cities, smaller towns and cities, and rural areas. These colleges welcome students from many different backgrounds and those who bring different talents and perspectives to campus discussions. Students who have grown up in other countries are highly valued (although instruction is almost always in English).
Additional information about any of these institutions is readily available on their Web sites. The Council of Independent Colleges has, from its Web site [http://www.cic.org/], links to most of these institutions.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
