Magazine

In a moment of rapid change for higher education and the workforce, students are being asked to navigate increasing uncertainty about their futures. A recent conversation with New York Times best-selling author Jeff Selingo about his new book highlights how a St. Olaf education — grounded in research, mentorship, and off-campus experiences — can meet that moment. 

Beneath the vaulted ceilings of the Washington National Cathedral, members of St. Olaf College’s Board of Regents, alumni, and college leaders gathered this February for a discussion with a New York Times best-selling author who specializes in higher education. But instead of exploring admissions statistics or rankings, the conversation focused on something more fundamental: what do students actually need from their college experience — and how can St. Olaf prepare them for a rapidly changing world?

The cost of higher education continues to rise. The job market is shifting, in part due to the rapid development of artificial intelligence. Entry-level roles, the traditional starting points for many graduates, are becoming less stable, even as employers place greater emphasis on experience and adaptability. 

“For decades, the American Dream has been inextricably linked to a college degree, but as costs climb and the cultural rhetoric around education shifts, many families are left wondering if the system still works — or if they are just left to work the system,” Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Tarshia Stanley, who moderated the dialogue, said in opening. “Our guest tonight has spent more than two decades investigating those very questions.”

Jeff Selingo, journalist and author of the new book Dream School: Finding the College That’s Right for You, joined Professor of English and Associate Dean for the First-Year Experience and Sophomore Thriving Diane LeBlanc to explore how the education landscape is in a moment of unprecedented uncertainty — but also of profound opportunity.

In the environment graduates are entering, the skills most needed are not narrowly technical, but broadly human: the ability to think critically, communicate effectively, work collaboratively, and navigate ambiguity. These are, notably, the very skills at the heart of a liberal arts education.

What matters most, Selingo argues, is how those skills are paired with experience. 

“If you combine the tenets of a liberal arts education with the proven ability to get work done, and you build in hands-on experiences, particularly research, internships, short-term projects, or campus jobs, I think these are the students that are going to thrive in the next couple of years,” he says. 

At St. Olaf, this pairing is increasingly intentional. Opportunities for undergraduate research, internships, campus employment, and community engagement are not treated as add-ons, but as extensions of the classroom. They are ways for students to test ideas, build confidence, and begin to imagine themselves in the world beyond college. 

It is these very elements that prompted Selingo to feature St. Olaf in his book. 

In Dream School, Selingo shifts the focus from how colleges admit students to how students can better pick colleges. He encourages students and families to think more broadly about the traits that define excellent colleges, and he provides tools to help students discover their dream school. At the end of the book, Selingo includes a list of 75 colleges and universities that he calls the “New Dream Schools” — including St. Olaf.

“This list highlights institutions with strong outcomes, accessible admissions, and dynamic student experiences,” Selingo writes. “Among the factors I considered when creating the list: affordability, financial health, student engagement, geographic diversity, and career outcomes.”

The book notes that student engagement and satisfaction scores are high at St. Olaf, where incoming students take several courses in small cohorts and participate in a year-long orientation program that fosters a sense of belonging. The college is known for having a great classroom experience and excellent lab facilities, as well as strong on-campus research experiences and a robust team of career coaches. St. Olaf offers more than 5,000 experiential learning opportunities every year for students to test out career paths and learn new skills, and 88 percent of graduates participate in an internship, research, or other hands-on-learning opportunities during their time on the Hill.

That commitment to supporting students and providing access to a transformative education is exactly what defines a dream school, Selingo adds.

“A dream school is not about a single name or even a specific group of schools,” Selingo writes. “It’s about a place where students thrive, where they build confidence, find belonging, and launch into meaningful work and life.”

St. Olaf, he notes, “stood out because of how it delivers on that promise.”

Selingo’s work often begins with the assumptions families carry into the college search process — chief among them is the belief that distinction will unlock opportunity. 

“ There is this idea that if you go to one of these highly selective, highly ranked schools, that that magically will get you a job and open up doors that you didn’t know were there before,” Selingo says. “But if you’re just looking for selectivity, you might end up with a bad fit.”

It is a message grounded in both data and experience. In a survey of more than 3,000 parents, Selingo found that families consistently say they value student success, belonging, and meaningful work after graduation. Prestige, in contrast, ranks far lower. And yet, it continues to shape decisions — less because of personal conviction than due to the expectations of others. 

That tension, between what families say they want and what they feel pressured to pursue, framed much of the conversation at the National Cathedral. Yet LeBlanc noted that at St. Olaf, the same pressure point has become a source of strength, innovation, and enterprise. 

Campus leaders are increasingly focused on how students are supported from the moment they arrive — and how that support evolves over time. LeBlanc describes advising as a kind of connective tissue, “a thread” that runs through all four years of a student’s time on the Hill. It is not a single conversation or checkpoint, but an ongoing process — one designed to help students make sense of both where they are and where they are headed. 

At the center of that work is a refined and layered framework, four questions that unfold across a student’s four-year college journey: Where am I? Who am I? Where am I going? How do I get there? 

Each question meets Oles at a different moment — beginning with the disorientation of arrival and extending through the discovery of choosing a path forward.

“Advising extends scaffolding to deepen belonging,” LeBlanc says. “In terms of a supportive start, during the first year, students connect with faculty and peers through courses like Writing and Rhetoric and First-Year Seminar, and a bi-weekly meeting with their St. Olaf Orientation to Academics and Resources (SOAR) group. Each student has a designated team of advisors, including an academic advisor, a Success Coach, and SOAR peer leader, to support their academic, social, and personal growth. Measures of success differ, but if students make friends, get to know one or more of their professors, develop academic skills and knowledge, and get involved in a few activities on campus, they are likely to thrive.”

“A dream school is not about a single name or even a specific group of schools. It’s about a place where students thrive, where they build confidence, find belonging, and launch into meaningful work and life.”

— Jeffrey Selingo

If the first year at St. Olaf is about finding connection, the second year is often about finding direction — and welcoming the uncertainty that search might invite. 

Students are no longer new, but not yet settled. The structures that once held them have loosened, and the pressure to define a future begins to intensify. What they once saw as their destiny may no longer fit with their interests, or their future may be totally unwritten. 

“During  our development of the questions model, we found that some sophomores were leaping to the ‘Where am I going?’ before they really wrestled with the identity and purpose question, the ‘Who am I?’” LeBlanc explains. “In response to that, we’ve worked toward giving them the time, space, connections, and community to develop their pathway in a way that takes into consideration the person they have become and are becoming.”

Oles move into the sophomore year with their same academic advisor and success coach from their first year to focus on declaring a major by spring semester. Sophomore Experience activities such as the Soph-Prof Dinner, the Half-Way Soirée, and the Sophomore Symposium hold space for students to connect with faculty and staff and to meet new peers.

“As sophomores live with the question ‘Who Am I?’, they thrive when they build academic confidence, deepen connections, reflect on their purpose, and begin to shape career-related experiences,” LeBlanc says. 

For Selingo, that work is direct preparation for life post-graduation. 

“One of the things that I see in talking to a number of people who hire early career graduates is that they are looking for candidates who have experience in discernment, in problem-solving, in writing, and working in teams, the ability to complete a project, meet a deadline, and get stuff done right, and the desire to keep learning,” he says. “A liberal arts college experience is very focused on this particular skillset.”

As Stanley notes, these tenets are built into St. Olaf’s promise to its students: to not define a single path for success, but to make many paths visible — and to make them feel possible.

“A liberal arts education leads you to a return on your investment as long as you have moved deliberately through the experience,” she says. “If you have made the connections between your course work, the content, your skills sets, and you have incorporated work-world learning opportunities and things such as study-away and directed research, and you can translate this to an employer or a graduate program — your return on your career investment is exponential.” 

In Dream School, Selingo describes colleges like St. Olaf as places that deliver strong outcomes, meaningful experiences, and environments where students can grow. What defines a “dream school” is not prestige, but possibility. As the evening at the National Cathedral drew to a close, the panelists invited attendees to linger on several ideas: 

To rethink what college is for. To reconsider what success looks like. And to imagine a “dream school” not as a name — but as an experience.