This opinion piece by Kathryn Mohrman, president of Colorado College and chair of the Annapolis Group, was carried nationally by the Knight-Ridder News Service in September 1999.

BY KATHRYN MOHRMAN
FOR KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWS SERVICE

"Catch a wave and you're sitting on top of the world," or so the Beach Boys would have us believe in their summer anthems. But as any surfer will tell you, the thrill can be short-lived -- after riding one wave to shore, you must swim out and try to find another, hoping to be in the right place at the right time.

The same is true of waves in higher education. As the college search process hits high gear in these waning days of summer and into the fall, the future Class of 2004 and their parents should keep surfing in mind: The schools, majors, and professions most in demand today could be just another wave, a trend that has already or will soon reach its crest.

A college education should be more than a credential, a perceived ticket for admission to one's first job -- that's just the latest wave. In the most recent Newsweek/Kaplan's "How to Get Into College" issue, Seppy Basili, executive director of Kaplan Educational Centers, discusses this trend and points students to an alternative. "With society going through such rapid technological change, the college logo on your degree matters far less than the thinking and communication skills that can come from a liberal arts program," he writes. "Employers are beginning to recognize this. It's time that more students did, too."

In spite of the movement toward technical colleges, specialized programs, and big brand-name universities, traditional liberal arts colleges -- and the values to which they are committed -- continue to prosper. Why? Here are a few points to consider:

o Residential liberal arts colleges offer a unique educational environment marked by a focus on undergraduate students. Classes are smaller, based on interaction and dialogue more than lecture, and are taught by professors as opposed to teaching assistants. Research opportunities are geared toward undergraduates eager to gain hands-on experience, and students have more options to design their own programs, capitalizing on their individual talents and interests. At the same time, these colleges share a commitment to service learning and ethics.

o With healthy endowments, the nation's top liberal arts colleges spend many times more money per student than their larger college and university counterparts. And those funds are more likely to be spent on student programming including research, study abroad, and financial aid.

o Residential liberal arts colleges create their campuses as havens for learning, exploration, and discovery. In his preface to the Winter 1999 issue of Daedalus, the prestigious journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, editor Stephen R. Graubard writes that "the better liberal arts colleges seek to foster relations among students, faculty, and their communities that rely on continuous discourse, on an ethic of sharing not universally appreciated today. [They work toward] achieving intellectual purposes -- supporting the values of criticism and candid inquiry."

Prospective students and their families need to know that the high-tech, career/vocation-oriented, and other trendy options aren't their only choice in education. Since the founding of the United States, liberal arts has been the education of choice for many of our best and brightest students. Liberal arts colleges continue to exist today as vital communities of teaching, learning, and discourse for undergraduates -- not as educational anachronisms.

What does this mean for prospective college students? Liberal arts graduates

o are prepared for any career they choose and for the inevitable career changes they will face in the future

o have earned their educations - by participating, discussing, examining, critiquing, researching, not just listening passively and taking notes.

o are educated individually - according to their personal interests and talents, not as a product off an assembly line.

By combining intellectual pursuits with community service and cultural awareness, residential liberal arts colleges have produced -- in numbers higher proportionally than their total graduates -- Pulitzer and Nobel prize winners, Rhodes and Truman Scholars, Watson and Fulbright Fellows, and Peace Corps volunteers. And when seeking statistics on success, one need not look far to uncover that liberal arts colleges produce a disproportionately large number of the country's leaders in science, government, medicine, law, education, and business.

With college application pools reaching new levels -- both in quantity and in quality -- prospective students must consider all their options. Liberal arts colleges have stood the test of time, and will continue to be the education of choice for many members of this generation and those to come.

Kathryn Mohrman is president of Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colo., and chair of the Annapolis Group, 100 leading liberal arts colleges working cooperatively to promote greater public understanding about the role and value of liberal arts education.