The Greatest Challenge
This morning I was asked, “What is the greatest challenge Wabash College faces?”
I started to respond with a typical answer: demographics.
The demographics are tough. The echo-boom of the baby boom is receding, leaving the same number of colleges looking for fewer students.
Within that population, young men haven’t found their groove yet. They’re not graduating from high school at as high a rate as young women. They’re not going to college. They’re not graduating from college.
To be a college for men, we have to be the key that unlocks this potential. We need to be at the vanguard of providing direction and support.
What works at Wabash works at earlier levels of education too, and we already provide that indirectly by sending out Wabash men to teach high school. We’re also reaching out earlier with our Opportunities to Learn About Business (OLAB) and Wabash Liberal Arts Immersion (WLAIP) programs.
We get a lot of promising students from alumni who point us in their direction, and we’re exploring better ways to leverage those referrals, our greatest advantage.
But demographics aren't our greatest challenge.
Then there’s the fact that young people prefer urban to rural settings.
But Crawfordsville is really a mix of those two. The resurgence of the city under Mayor Todd Barton ’00 with the Stellar Communities designation is rejuvenating the communal element of the town, which is why we’re involved—students, faculty, and staff—in those efforts.
With those opportunities, location is becoming an edge.
So that’s not the toughest challenge.
the greatest challenge Wabash faces is that everybody in higher education can lie.
Everybody can say they provide a great education.
Everybody can say they create global leaders.
Everybody can say they have engaged this or that. They don’t have to prove it.
And don’t get me started about the rankings business. Because the ranking of colleges and universities is a business. It’s based on the fallacy that one school is uniformly better than another when the real question is, which school is uniformly better for my individual son or daughter? Which is the best match for him or her?
The strength of higher education in America is the broad range of schools that fit a whole spectrum of students which is why our distinctiveness in liberally educating young men and truly being the best at it matters.
if you buy a bad car you’ll find out pretty quickly. You can return it and ask for your money back. With a college education, you might not find out it was bad until 20, 30 years after graduation.
But if you look at the track record of our alumni 20 and 30 years out, you’ll see liberally educated Wabash men living lives of promise, purpose, and professional fulfillment.
When it comes to leadership in business and politics in Indiana and elsewhere, we have a disproportionately large footprint.
If you look at philanthropic returns to the College, we have the highest rate of alumni giving in the Great Lakes Colleges Association and are 16th nationally. Our alumni know the difference Wabash College made in their lives, for their families, and for their communities.
If you look at return on investment, payscale. com has rated Wabash very high, and we’re in the top-20 in the country when this is measured by others, right up there with many elite schools.
Our liberal arts education is informed by the Wabash National Study, which tells us students need to be challenged, to be confronted with moments that cut against the grain of their experience and beliefs, and that they need to do so in a compassionate environment that supports them in their hard work.
Our students walk the world through immersion learning courses. Read their writing in this edition of the magazine about their journeys to Vietnam and the American South, and you’ll realize the understanding and empathy students gain when issues they've studied in the classroom become real in the people they meet.
They put their liberal arts education into practice through our Liberal Arts Plus initiatives. They get a liberal arts education for life, but also learn the skills for that first job in what will become multiple careers.
so what separates Wabash from those who claim they offer this sort of education but don’t?
You do.
No one knows the difference this place can make better than our alumni and their families.
You are our truth.
Our charge, then, is to continue to tell the stories of your lives—lives which exemplify the benefits of a Wabash education—and to better equip you to spread the word. We’re working to be more supportive of alumni and friends to help you understand the most frequent questions you’ll be asked by prospective students and their parents. We need to give you updates—bite-sized bits of information to people for whom time is a premium—on what we’re doing. So, when a high school senior asks if he can study accounting here, you can explain our four-plus-one program with the Kelley School of Business. If he asks about engineering, you can talk about the 3-2 program with Purdue. If he wants to know about immersion learning, you can explain that we’re one of the few that provide those trips to him at little or no extra cost.
We have many ways we currently provide this information, and you’ll see even more soon. We welcome your suggestions. And referrals.
Because the answer to the greatest challenge Wabash faces is you.
GREGORY HESS
President | hessg@wabash.edu