The Hidden Ivies

Howard Greene, Matthew W. Greene

• Publisher: Collins Reference
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062011640
• Topic: Manuali di studio
• Subtopic: Guide di studio

Completely revised and updated with a dozen new colleges and universities, the essential guide students need to help them choose and gain admission to the outstanding schools that fit them best.

Based on Howard and Matthew Greene's years of counseling experience and research, The Hidden Ivies is an invaluable, in-depth look inside sixty-three renowned academic institutions. These private colleges and universities offer students a broad liberal arts education that will help them build a strong foundation for the rest of their lives. The Greenes help families understand what makes an Ivy League college so desirable, and why these Hidden Ivies (some less well-known than others) offer an educational and personal experience to rival that found on Ivy campuses.

In this fully revised and updated edition—featuring new institutions, including Dickinson College, Fordham University, and Southern Methodist University—the premier educational consultants and authors of Making It Into a Top College take you school-by-school, revealing:

• Why these are unique institutions of exceptional merit
• What criteria to use in evaluating different programs
• The admissions requirements for each selective school
• How to approach the selective college admissions process today
• Student perspectives on their college experiences
• The value of pursuing a liberal arts education

Choosing a college is one of the most important decisions every student—and their parents—will ever make. With costs rising and so many to choose from—and the competition for acceptance more intense than ever before— The Hidden Ivies offers invaluable insights and advice to help every student choose and apply to the right school: the place where they will thrive, academically, socially, and personally.

ONE

The Liberal Arts: What Is a Liberal Arts Education and Why Is It Important Today?

Every session we have with parents and students on college planning inevitably leads to this question: “Why should my child go to a liberal arts college? How will it prepare him/her for a job or career? Why not jump right into a specialized major?” In this chapter, we answer that question. We have found that there is a great deal of misunderstanding and a general lack of information about the nature of a liberal arts education, its value in society, and its role in preparing students for graduate programs and careers. Many students are unaware of the differences between a “college” and a “university,” between a graduate and an undergraduate education and degree, and between degree programs specializing in technical, business, arts, or other fields and those offering or demanding study across the arts and sciences disciplines.

We defend the value of a liberal arts education, building on the work of many prominent scholars who have argued that an education spanning multiple academic disciplines and requiring that students learn core concepts, methods, and content builds unparalleled strengths in reasoning, understanding, and communication, preparing students for any academic or professional challenge they may choose. At the same time, we avoid for the most part the disagreements among “liberal” and “conservative” thinkers on necessary reforms in liberal arts education and on whether changes over the past several decades have been “good” or “bad.” However, we must add that in our minds, liberal arts colleges have changed for the better and significant choice exists among these institutions to give students a great deal of leeway in determining which curriculum and environment best suits their needs and interests.

Goals of a Liberal Arts Education

As Nathan Glazer has stated, “Liberal education has meant many things, but at its core is the idea of the kind of education that a free citizen of a society needs to participate in it effectively.”* In a complex, shifting world, it is essential to develop a high degree of intellectual literacy and critical-thinking skills; a sense of moral and ethical responsibility to one’s community; and the ability to reason clearly, to think rationally, to analyze information intelligently, to respond to people in a compassionate and fair way, to continue learning new information and concepts over a lifetime, to appreciate and gain pleasure from the beauty of the arts and literature and to use these as an inspiration and a solace when needed, to revert to our historical past for lessons that will help shape the future intelligently and avoid unnecessary mistakes, and to create a sense of self-esteem that comes from personal accomplishments and challenges met with success.

• Think and problem-solve in a creative, risk-taking manner.
• Express ideas and feelings in organized, logical, coherent, descriptive, rich language, both orally and in writing.
• Analyze, organize, and use data for meaningful solutions.
• Develop the capability of setting goals with appropriate information and research and then achieve these goals with proper means.
• Help define a personal-value and ethical system that serves throughout life in making the challenging decisions one will face.
• Have the capacity and instinct to work in a cooperative, collaborative manner with others in one’s professional and community life.

These are ambitious goals! How different colleges and universities achieve them reveals variations in educational philosophy, institutional personality and history, and particular social and academic strengths and missions. All the liberal arts colleges share a commitment to disciplinary and student diversity, intellectual and otherwise. To varying degrees, these colleges require students to pursue courses in key academic subject areas, some with more specificity, others with a great deal of freedom, in order to expose students to multiple areas of knowledge, diverging perspectives on the world, and different paths to scientific, ethical, social, and humanistic understanding.

Content is important, but so are process and style. Liberal arts colleges may expect students to master a core body of knowledge, including Western and, increasingly, non-Western masterworks in fields ranging from physics to music to government, comparative literature, history, and language. Students will build on their secondary school education by majoring in one or more specific areas of knowledge (academic “disciplines” or “fields”), but will pursue areas of interest within key general academic areas: the physical sciences; mathematics; the humanities (history, English and other languages, visual and performing arts, and so forth); and the social sciences (political science, sociology, etc.). So-called cross-disciplinary courses of study are offered in such areas as women’s studies, African American studies, environmental studies, and social psychology. Students will be exposed to a wide range of subjects that they may not have encountered previously: anthropology, genetics, philosophy, criminology, economics, engineering sciences, religion, education. But all of this will be in the context of a broad-based approach to learning. One cannot graduate from a liberal arts college without having experienced course work in a multitude of subject areas. The goal: an intelligent and “well educated” student who can converse knowledgeably about a wide range of topics and who has learned how to learn about anything under the sun.

Thus, process and style undergird a liberal arts education. Students learn how to think, approach problems, write, present information intelligibly, and make coherent arguments in their field of choice and others they may encounter. A liberal arts education challenges students’ conceptions and pushes them to ask difficult questions, question established answers, and develop their own arguments through logical reasoning and the discovery of new understandings. A liberal arts education helps a student specialize in at least one particular area, but also to see and make connections among multiple fields of inquiry. As Ernest Boyer, a former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has argued, traditional research designed to promote the advancement of knowledge should be complemented by the “scholarship of integration,” which makes connections across disciplines; the “scholarship of application,” which concentrates on the interrelationship between theory and practice; and the “scholarship of teaching,” which both educates students and attracts them to the academic world. Such a view of scholarship clearly relates to the goals of a liberal arts education.

Learning How to Learn: The Luxury of Time

Alan Ryan writes, “At its best, liberal education opens a conversation between ourselves and the immortal dead, gives us voices at our shoulders asking us to think again and try harder.”* How many of us, academics or not, would not relish the notion of taking four years of our lives to keep open that conversation, enjoying what we call the luxury of time, to think, to make connections, to question, and to learn? Howard Bowen, a highly respected teacher/researcher of higher education, writes in an early important study:

As compared with others, college-educated people on the average are more open-minded toward new ideas, more curious, more adventurous in confronting new questions and problems, and more open to experience. They are likely to be more rational in their approach to issues. They are more aware of diversity of opinions and outlooks, of the legitimacy of disagreement…. They are less authoritarian, less prejudiced, and less dogmatic. At the same time, they are more independent and autonomous in their views, more self-confident and more ready to disagree. They are more cosmopolitan.†

Bowen’s point is that attempts to measure the value-added benefit of a college education often consider the wrong issue. The major benefit of a liberal arts education is that it will produce the kinds of educated leaders that will benefit our economic, political, social, and family lives.

John Wooden, the great basketball coach at UCLA, once quipped, “It’s what you know after you learn everything that counts.” A liberal arts education, particularly one obtained in a residential college setting, seeks to provide that learning experience and that sense of knowing a lot, but also knowing what you do not know. “We go to college,” the poet and teacher Robert Frost said, “to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we haven’t learned in high school. Once we have learned to read, the rest can be trusted to add itself to us.” As with the majority of his observations and commentary, Frost is full of irony in his view of the purpose of the liberal arts experience. His message, as true today as it was many years ago (when Frost was at Dartmouth and Amherst), is that reading intelligently and analytically, with a critical mental eye, will enable one to carry on his/her education for the remainder of a lifetime. In a sense, once one has “learned to read” in its broadest meaning, he/she is prepared to go out into the world. It is the definition of reading that counts.

Ernest Martin Hopkins, a former president of Dartmouth, characterized in his 1929 convocation address to the entering class the view of the essential qualities of the liberal arts college: “The liberal arts college is interested in the wholeness of life and in all human activity…. It is characterized as liberal because it recognizes no master to its limit to seek knowledge and no boundaries beyond which it has not the right to search. Its primary concern is not with what men and women shall do but with what they shall be.” The liberal arts education is the means by which outstanding young men and women will develop those skills and qualities of mind and spirit that will enable them to lead productive and valuable lives. This means not only for their own well-being, but also for the good of their families, communities, and the larger society. The colleges we have selected are among the leaders in higher education in preparing young adults to take their places as responsible and enlightened leaders in the world. To think critically and with a conscience, to be resilient in an accelerating world of technological, intellectual, cultural, and social change, are critical skills for the individual and society’s maintenance.

AN EXAMPLE OF THE LIBERAL ARTS IN ACTION

Pomona College’s faculty has a ten-point list of what skills it teaches to help students succeed in later life through exposure to the arts and sciences curriculum. The college educates students to:

1. Read literature critically.
2. Use and understand the scientific method.
3. Use and understand formal reasoning.
4. Understand and analyze data.
5. Analyze creative art critically.
6. Perform or produce creative art.
7. Explore and understand human behavior.
8. Explore and understand a historical culture.
9. Compare and contrast contemporary cultures.
10. Think critically about values and rationality.

Trends in the Liberal Arts over Time

The liberal arts colleges in America are dynamic institutions, constantly if slowly evolving in reaction to their environment; the demands of students, parents, graduates, policy makers, and others; and the leadership of administrators and faculty. Important changes have taken place in the liberal arts and in postsecondary education over the past several decades, including diversification of staff, student body, and curriculum; provision of financial aid; accentuation of the continuing struggle between teaching and research; expansion of educational access; and pursuit of graduate degrees. We discuss these trends and others on the following pages.

Inclusion

Perhaps one of the most powerful changes in liberal arts colleges since the 1950s has been the expansion of educational opportunities for nonwhite, non-Protestant, non-wealthy, and non-male students. The policy of exclusion at the elite institutions based on racial, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic factors is clearly a thing of the past. These colleges have redefined their missions and have worked assiduously to attract, retain, and assist a student body that better reflects American society.

In addition to doing away with formal, public, or hidden policies of exclusion, selective colleges have actively tried both to change their image and broaden their appeal and impact. They recruit students from nontraditional backgrounds by visiting their schools and writing to them. They hire special admissions officers of color, put together targeted informational material, work with the College Board to identify talented test-takers, and form close associations with organizations like A Better Chance, Questbridge, and Prep for Prep, which help students of color succeed and go on to college. Colleges have boosted financial aid resources and expanded efforts of alumni to identify appropriate candidates. They have hired multicultural advisors and staffed centers on campus to encourage tolerance and diversity and to support each student’s needs. Of course, this is a continuing process, and colleges, not to mention American society, are learning about what it takes to promote and maintain diversity in a way that is successful for everyone. But a major shift in thinking has occurred so that not only do colleges prohibit and discourage exclusion, they see inclusion and diversity as essential elements of their educational missions.

Liberal arts colleges have also continued to diversify their faculty, who serve as role models and offer differing voices to expose students to multiple perspectives. In the past, class snobbery extended to the college faculty as well as to the students. Very few teachers were not white, male, Protestant, and educated from the same small band of institutions. Today, liberal arts colleges certainly cross-fertilize each other’s faculties, but representation of multiple groups and viewpoints on the faculty has dramatically increased.

Not only are the faculty more diverse at the liberal arts colleges, but the courses they teach have broadened and fragmented. At most liberal arts colleges today, students can access courses in new areas of scholarship, including African American studies, women’s studies (gender studies), environmental studies, non-Western literature, ethics and science, and so forth. The “core curriculum” of the great works of Western literature, history, philosophy, mathematics, sciences, and the arts has splintered and branched. Few colleges have completely dismantled the “core.” Most have found a middle path combining “traditional” scholarship with exposure to new and alternative (“critical,” “postmodern,” “non-Western”) fields of study.

Finally, we should mention the prominent role of athletics as a means of recruitment among disadvantaged and nontraditional groups over time. This was one of the first vehicles by which colleges identified talented students in nontraditional environments. While the Ivies still do not offer athletic scholarships, their need-based financial aid has allowed them to attract and enroll “scholar athletes” regardless of ability to pay. The fact that at many selective liberal arts colleges some 50 percent of students are receiving some sort of financial aid indicates their willingness to promote socioeconomic diversity. Many potential students and families may still react negatively to the cost of private liberal arts colleges and the image they may still carry of being snobbish, elitist places. However, while these colleges do not have the natural diversity that many state universities likely attract, they have pursued diversity th...