Looking for a Truly Good Education

Looking for a Truly Good Education  (200Kb)

Why do some colleges and universities have a more positive impact than others on student learning and development?  Because of their selectivity in admissions? That is what public opinion, those ever-popular rankings, and the publicity pieces that elite institutions send out would have you believe.  But the correct answer is more complicated and more profound than that.

Liberal arts colleges have claimed all along that their very nature enhances the environment for student learning.  Now research sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts has found evidence to support that claim.

When Students Learn Best

A dozen years ago two of higher education’s leading researchers, Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini, suggested that students learn best when professors show that they care about their teaching and about their students’ development, when people all across campus value "mind-work," when the small size of a college helps everyone to have shared experiences around ideas, when students and faculty interact frequently inside and outside of the classroom, and when there is a wealth of interactions on campus among students too. That rare combination of traits seems to be found most often at small, selective liberal arts colleges.

In fact, for some time there has been evidence supporting this idea.  The evidence comes from "cross-sectional" studies comparing different institutional types.  Students and alumni of liberal arts colleges report a different undergraduate experience than students and alumni of other institutions. 

The difference includes higher academic and social effort, more intense learning experiences, and more extracurricular involvement.

The cross-sectional evidence has never made clear, though, how much it is the liberal arts colleges themselves that make the difference.  Another possible interpretation of the evidence is that liberal arts colleges simply attract and enroll students who are more inclined to high involvement and more open to being changed by their education.

Positive College Experiences

So which is it... High-quality students, or a positive campus culture that set liberal arts institutions apart?  Researchers have looked over several years and found that attending a liberal arts college has a positive effect on the quality of the college experience.

To guard against giving the colleges credit for what students had going for them before they ever enrolled, the researchers looked carefully at the personal qualities and values that students brought with them to college, in addition to their experiences in college.  Pre-college data included detailed information about each student: household income, reading habits, parents’ education, and high school activities, as well as college expectations and career aspirations.  The full research report is available on the web site of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.
Do Liberal Arts Colleges Really Foster Good Practice?  (880Kb)

Scoring High on "Good Practices"

Pascarella and his research partners grouped a total of 19 good practices into seven categories:

• Student-faculty contact--quality of non-classroom interactions; faculty interest in teaching and student development (Will professors know my name and interest?  Are faculty available and approachable?)
• Cooperation among students--faculty emphasis on cooperative learning; course-related interactions (for instance, are there student study sessions or language clubs?
• Active learning and time on task--academic effort and involvement; essay examinations; faculty using higher-order questioning techniques; emphasis on higher-order examination questions; computer use (A, I asked to think creatively beyond what is written on the page?  Will I leave the course not only knowing more facts, but feeling a bit wiser about the world?
• Prompt feedback--work returned quickly with comments
• High expectations--course challenge and effort; scholarly and intellectual emphasis; number of textbooks and amount of assigned reading; number of term papers and written reports
• Quality of teaching--skill and clarity; organization and preparation
• Influential interactions with other students--quality of interactions; interactions not related to courses; cultural and interpersonal involvement (Will activities such as college bowl, athletics, or theatre be accessible to me?)

Since the path-breaking work of Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson two decades ago, a broad consensus has emerged, supported by extensive research, that these topical areas encompass good practice.

In their first year, students at liberal arts colleges scored their institutions significantly higher than students at both national research universities and regional comprehensive institutions on 12 of 19 measures of good practice.  The advantages spanned student-faculty contact, cooperative learning, prompt feedback, effective teaching, three out of five measures on active learning, and three out of four measures on high expectations.  In the second year, the gap in favor of liberal arts college students continued to widen.  They reported higher scores on nine of the 19 good practices compared with students at research universities, and on four of 19 compared with students at comprehensive regional institutions.  Additional effects in the third year were much smaller.  Though the accumulation of differences tailed off by the third year, no passage of time took away from liberal arts college students that sizeable advantage due to good practices that they had gotten in the first year, and that their professors reinforced in the following years.

The study suggests strongly that liberal arts colleges have a significant edge in fostering good practices in undergraduate education.  The positive link between studying at a liberal arts college and experiencing good practices cannot be explained away by differences in student background.  The link does not depend on how selective a liberal arts college is in its admissions, nor on whether students live on campus, nor even whether they attend full-time or part-time.

The liberal arts colleges in the study did enroll more students whose parents had been to college, more students with extensive extracurricular records, and more students with strong social networks in high school.  The research team, however, filtered out these advantages before measuring differences in good practices.

What Liberal Arts Colleges Do That Works

Liberal arts colleges seem to do several things at once that let them to maximize good practices.  In an educational community with 1,500 or 2,000 students, compared with 23,000 (the median of the research universities in this study) or 12,500 (the median of the comprehensive regional institutions), the more manageable scale invites much broader participation by a greater proportion of students.  Pascarella and his fellow researchers point to the recent efforts of large universities to develop learning communities and living-learning centers, in the hope of replicating the advantages of close attention and cooperation that are hallmarks of liberal arts colleges.

Liberal arts colleges appear to have a spirit that embeds and sustains good practices throughout their programs. The differences in good practices between liberal arts colleges and other institutions are most pronounced during the first year in college.  That finding is consistent with a widely held view, that the most powerful benefits of education in a liberal arts college come from being introduced to what it means to be a college student during the first year.  That is when, after all, students first face an education that should be very different from what they have experienced in high school.

There are many things that you might be looking for when choosing a college.  Are good practices that can make your education long-lasting and meaningful near the top of your list?  Then you should consider a liberal arts college.