{"id":201,"date":"2012-01-11T15:56:27","date_gmt":"2012-01-11T15:56:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/remarks\/cic-remarks-1-6-12\/"},"modified":"2013-02-15T09:59:28","modified_gmt":"2013-02-15T15:59:28","slug":"cic-remarks-1-6-12","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/wp.stolaf.edu\/president\/public-remarks\/cic-remarks-1-6-12\/","title":{"rendered":"Marketing the Liberal Arts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Council of Independent Colleges Presidents’ Meeting
\nJanuary 6, 2012<\/p>\n

I do not recall a time when there has been greater skepticism about higher education\u2019s value proposition than there is today.\u00a0 It\u2019s not going to get better any time soon.\u00a0 This skepticism is particularly acute for the liberal arts, where the path from the degree to a job after graduation is not a direct one.\u00a0 The degree of this skepticism varies from person to person and situation to situation, but in general the higher an institution\u2019s price in relation to its measurable outcomes, the more skepticism it will face.\u00a0\u00a0 For a very few institutions with commanding reputations, the value proposition is self-evident to most consumers.\u00a0 For everybody else, having a compelling account of the value of the experience the institution offers relative to its cost is among the institution\u2019s most critical tasks.\u00a0 That means we have to market the value of the liberal arts.<\/p>\n

I venture that most of the institutions represented in this room today operate on a tuition-driven financial model.\u00a0 Our college certainly does.\u00a0 For tuition-driven institutions, our ability to deliver on our mission absolutely depends upon our ability to generate sufficient net tuition revenue to fund our operations.\u00a0 Generating that net tuition revenue requires enrolling the right number and the right kind of students, and accomplishing that task requires the compelling value proposition I referred to a moment ago.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The value proposition, in other words, is mission-critical, and that makes developing and articulating it one of the President\u2019s top responsibilities.\u00a0 It has to be one of the few things we think about every day, thoroughly and completely understand, and own with a passion and zeal that are reflected in the way we communicate it. What follows are some thoughts \u2014 recognizing and respecting how different our institutions are \u2014 about what the key elements of that value proposition might be.<\/p>\n

The most compelling value proposition will argue that a liberal arts education leads to financial independence, professional accomplishment, and personal fulfillment.\u00a0 I begin with financial independence because it is the proverbial bottom line.\u00a0 No parent wants to spend tens, even hundreds, of thousands of dollars on college only to have their student return home and live in the basement.\u00a0 We have to be able to demonstrate that that is not what happens with our students.\u00a0 That means we should be able to say exactly where the students who crossed the stage and shook the President\u2019s hand at the last commencement are six months later:\u00a0 what percent have jobs, what percent have gone on to graduate or professional school, what percent are doing other things and what those things are.\u00a0 This information should be available by major. We should be able to name the top employers of our graduates, have information about their starting salaries, disclose our graduates\u2019 acceptance rates into graduate and professional programs, and name the institutions at which they are studying.\u00a0 This information should be available on our websites, clearly displayed in a manner that is easy to understand, and widely shared with prospective students and their families and with all of our other key constituencies.\u00a0 U.S. News and World Report<\/em> will tell prospective students and their families how much you spend per student or your acceptance rate, or your alumni giving rate.\u00a0 None of that information is actually relevant to the key question on their minds:\u00a0 \u201cwhere will my education take me in life?\u201d\u00a0 The information I\u2019m describing speaks directly to that question.<\/p>\n

A compelling value proposition will demonstrate that these outcomes were not the result of serendipity but rather of our intentional institutional efforts to assist students in making the transition from college to the next phase of their lives.\u00a0 We need to be able to show how we engage students early in their college years in conversation about what they like to do, what they are good at, and how those abilities and passions map onto a career direction; how we then help them to explore those career directions through internships, externships, job shadowing, and the like; how we harness the power of our alumni network to assist students in applying for jobs; how we work with employers to bring our students to their attention; how we support students during the job search.<\/p>\n

A compelling value proposition not only communicates what happens to our students immediately upon graduation but also reports on the trajectory of their careers.\u00a0 This is the professional accomplishment part.\u00a0 So we need to have and to communicate specific information about how our alumni have progressed in their careers.\u00a0 Twenty years out, where are our alumni?\u00a0 What leadership positions do they hold in their organizations?\u00a0 What professional recognition have they received?\u00a0 What further degrees have they earned?\u00a0 What are their average salaries?\u00a0 And we need to know this across the broad range of our alumni base, rather than relying on anecdotes about the most highly visible graduates that we all have.\u00a0 A truly compelling value proposition will connect the success of our graduates twenty years out to specific aspects of their liberal arts education in ways sufficiently concrete that they make sense to seventeen year-olds and their parents.<\/p>\n

Being direct, forthright, transparent and specific about our students\u2019 actual outcomes after college is the precondition to extending the conversation to the outcomes of a liberal arts education that are less tangible, though not less important. I call it the \u201cprecondition\u201d because it takes off the table \u2014 assuming we have good outcomes to report \u2014 the greatest challenge to marketing the liberal arts, which is to convince prospective students and their families that a degree in English \u2014 I pick on my own discipline \u2014 however fulfilling and gratifying it might be during the college years, is not going to be a liability in the competition for jobs with students who majored in a subject with a much more direct path to employment.\u00a0 By leading with this information we establish our bona fides <\/em>as institutions committed to the long-term happiness and prosperity and success of our students, not just to the tuition revenue they bring us while on campus.<\/p>\n

Having earned the right to speak more expansively about a liberal arts education, we are now free to explain to students and their families how that education prepares them for the success we have just demonstrated.\u00a0 How, for example, the defining characteristic of the world our students will inhabit is change and how a liberal arts education best prepares you to flourish in an unknown future because it is not tied to a specific version of the present.\u00a0 How it equips you with a toolkit \u2014 the ability to write clear, correct prose; to reason quantitatively; to understand the geography of human knowledge so that you are able to recognize a problem and to know what kinds of questions you can ask to best yield insights into that type of problem; to work productively in groups; to learn in community with others; to function in a multiculturally-enriched environment; to appreciate the arts, and so on.<\/p>\n

We shouldn\u2019t be afraid to make this case, especially when it rests on the kind of solid data I have just been describing.\u00a0 The proposition that when today\u2019s high school seniors are my age they will face a very different world than the one they inhabit today is self-evident.\u00a0 I went to college before the personal computer, before the fall of the Iron Curtain, before the Eurozone, before cell phones, Facebook, and Twitter.\u00a0 Most parents of prospective college students could easily come up with a similar version of then and now, and they can easily extrapolate from their own experience to what their children can expect.\u00a0 An education that equips their students to flourish in an uncertain future by giving them transferable knowledge and skills and teaching them how to learn on their own is very attractive.<\/p>\n

I said at the beginning of these remarks that a compelling value proposition presents the outcomes of a liberal arts education as financial independence, professional success, and personal happiness.\u00a0 Personal happiness is the hardest to quantify, obviously, but there are behaviors we can measure that are characteristic of active, engaged, citizens, such as civic engagement, volunteerism, memberships in interest groups from Amnesty International to Friends of the Symphony to Pheasants Forever, and alumni surveys can yield that information. Compelling personal testimony by our graduates is another important source of information.\u00a0 Because it is the least immediate, least measurable, and least directly correlated to what happens in college, I frankly think this element of the value proposition only works when it complements the other elements I have focused on in these remarks.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t stand alone.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll stop now to leave time for the other speakers and for your thoughts and comments.\u00a0 The days are over when we can simply assert the value of the liberal arts and expect people to accept that.\u00a0 Most of our institutions are not the least expensive option that our prospective students and their families are considering, and therefore we need to make the case that the extra investment we are asking them to make up front has concrete results in the short term and in the long term, and we have to make that case with appropriate modesty and humility, letting the facts speaks for themselves.\u00a0 If we do that, we can be very successful at marketing the liberal arts.<\/p>\n

Thanks for your kind attention.<\/p>\n

David R. Anderson ’74<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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