Hastings College Commencement

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A Few Words to the Graduates

Commencement Speech - Hastings College
Hastings, Nebraska
May 19, 2001

Richard Ekman
President
Council of Independent Colleges

On behalf of the faculties, deans, and presidents of the 482 other colleges and universities that are members of the Council of Independent Colleges, I want to express enthusiastic congratulations to the members of the Hastings College Class of 2001. You have met the challenges of this distinguished institution, and the demanding academic standards of the faculty. You and your parents have balanced competing financial pressures in the family in order to reach this day. And you have focused on your studies, but also learned much from your fellow students outside the classroom through activities and involvement in the community.

What you have experienced over the past four or five years you may think of now as simply "going to college," as many of your friends from high school also "went to college" at New Mexico State University or Fort Hayes State University, or the University of Southern Colorado, but the experience you have had here-whether you recognize it or not-has been rather different from the undergraduate experiences of most of your high school friends. Indeed, independent liberal arts colleges, of which there are about 500 in the United States, enroll less than 10 percent of all American undergraduates. You and your colleagues in the senior classes of liberal arts colleges across America who are receiving their diplomas this month have had the rare good fortune to benefit from a form of education that is both distinctively American and of proven educational effectiveness. In many ways, it is superior to the other forms that are available.

A liberal arts education prepares you not only for your first job after college, but also for the second and the third. The now classic study of the value of a liberal arts education is the one that Robert Beck, then vice president of AT&T, conducted in the 1980s on the career patterns of AT&T's managerial employees. That study showed that those who had a liberal arts education rose much further in their careers than those who had received other kinds of education. The AT&T study demonstrates with striking force that not only were history or English majors more likely to succeed at AT&T than, say, engineering majors, but-most significantly-that a student who majored in chemistry or in engineering at a liberal arts institution rose more rapidly in the company than a chemistry or engineering major who pursued the same field of study at another kind of institution-including both narrowly focused technical institutes and bigger universities. In other words, not only was the instruction in the classroom at a liberal arts college-in English, history, chemistry, or engineering-better, on average, than what might be found elsewhere, but the environment of learning-residential, small classes, lots of interaction between faculty members and students, and a rich extracurricular life that reinforces what happens in the classroom-added other ingredients that make for a highly successful undergraduate education.

Please don't misunderstand me: it is certainly possible to obtain a good education at a large university, but it is significant, I think, that many of the state universities across the country are now trying to create what they are calling "honors colleges" in order to address, at least for a tiny fraction of their students, the difficulties of education in a setting where the faculty cannot spend very much time with students. And outside the U.S., especially in Latin America and Eastern Europe, where enrollment in higher education is now growing rapidly, the fastest growth has been in the creation of hundreds of private institutions, based more-or-less on the model of the American liberal arts college. American research universities have trained foreigners for years. As democracy has come to other parts of the world, our model of liberal arts institutions has been one of our biggest educational exports.

You probably know that you have received a good education here at Hastings. But your responsibility now, as alumni, citizens, taxpayers, and leaders in your communities, is to help others understand why America needs more people who have been educated just as you have. In America today, two-thirds of all high school graduates go on to obtain some form of higher education. This is a remarkable increase over the number as recently as a generation ago, your parents' generation, when fewer than one-third of high school graduates went on to college. The rising aspirations of Americans who have sought additional education have been matched by the actions of state governments in expanding public universities and community colleges, in creating new branches of the system. Furthermore, in recent years, many states have enacted tuition grant programs that have provided money to individual students to spend at institutions of their own choosing. The broadening of access to higher education has been unquestionably a very good thing for America.

But it has also given rise to some serious confusion about the true differences between public and private colleges and universities. When I say that liberal arts colleges offer a superior form of education, I mean that we are able - at Hastings, for example - to address some major national needs especially well. For example, it is widely recognized that there is a shortage of scientists in America today. It is also the case that career scientists-that is, PhDs who work in scientific fields for corporations or for research institutions-receive their undergraduate degrees in disproportionate numbers from liberal arts colleges. Our colleges can help meet our country's need for new scientists because we already prepare scientists so well.

Much the same can be said about the preparation of teachers for the elementary and secondary schools. A graduate of a liberal arts college who wants to be a school teacher usually knows his or her subject very well. He or she is already accustomed to a learning environment in which the teacher takes an active interest in students. Not surprisingly, school districts often prefer to hire the graduates of liberal arts colleges over others who might be available. There is now a nationwide shortage of teachers and, I daresay, anyone who has graduated from Hastings College who wishes to pursue a career as a public school teacher will find him- or herself exceptionally well prepared for professional success.

Much of what our colleges do well goes beyond the strengths of specific programs or courses. Small colleges, for example, were the first educational institutions to recognize that campuses should not remain aloof from their communities, but rather work closely with community leaders toward the solution of local problems, bringing to bear academic expertise and a willingness to learn. This is hardly surprising, given the explicit moral and social values that were fundamental in the founding of most private colleges and have remained important hallmarks of the education they provide.

The connection between a healthy democracy and high quality colleges is as old as America. The 18th century plotters of the American Revolution studied the models of civic life of the 16th century Venetian city-states, and the earlier Roman and Greek models. Madison, Adams, and Jefferson came to understand that democracy could work well only in small communities. The North American continent was quickly settled as small towns, each with its own church or two, and many with their own colleges. (The Presbyterians were especially active in building colleges in the 18th and 19th centuries. In fact, with only 250,000 Presbyterians in America on the eve of the Civil War, in contrast to the 850,000 Methodists and 570,000 Baptists, it is remarkable how many Presbyterian colleges were founded then and still are thriving today - admittedly with varying degrees of continuing Presbyterian identity.)

Each of you will need to decide for him- or herself whether the education you have received at Hastings has met your expectations, whether it has been of high quality. You no doubt have an opinion about that now, and I predict that your opinion will change several times over the next 20 years. Today, you may wish to consider what kind of a citizen or a parent you will be as a consequence of having been given this special kind of college education. Will you be more or less likely, for example, to ask questions of the teachers and principals in the schools your own children attend than, say, your parents were when they felt that something was amiss in your fifth grade classroom. When a bond issue is on the ballot to fund the construction of a new theatre or dormitory for the college near the town in which you happen to be living ten years from now, will you be more or less inclined to favor it than, say, your parents were. Or when President Dudley (or his successor, or his successor's successor) writes you a letter in which he appeals to you to contribute to the alumni fund of Hastings College, will you be generous or not, involved in alumni activities or not, inclined to encourage your children to receive an education just like yours, or not?

We are all familiar with the words of the nation's third president, Thomas Jefferson, when he argued that the new American republic had a responsibility to make higher education widely available to its citizens, because the responsible exercise of self-governance in a democracy is directly tied to the ability of the people to be well enough educated to be able to judge for themselves about important questions facing the nation. Thanks to the education you've received during your years at Hastings College, you already have the intellectual capacity to fulfill Jefferson's ideal - an ideal that I hope you will rely upon increasingly as you go through life.

Finally, let me express the hope that you will come to understand fully how fortunate you are to be part of this distinctively American way of preparing for the rest of your lives, this form of higher education that is of unmatched effectiveness. I thank you for the opportunity to share in your celebration today, and I join with your parents, teachers, and friends in congratulating you, the members of the Class of 2001.