From the Desk of the President
Thomas Aquinas College: Recruiting and Retaining Students Suited to a Liberal Education
(College Planning and Management - March, 2009)
[Index
of Past Articles by President Dillon]
The present financial turmoil in the country is affecting institutions
of all kinds. In higher education, admissions officers are feeling
the pressure in their efforts to recruit freshmen for the 2009-
2010 academic year. Reports show applications are down dramatically,
and waiting lists at many schools are likely to be shorter than
in recent years or even disappear altogether.
The Special Character of Liberal Education
While striving to maintain the ample number of applicants we have
enjoyed in recent years, we at Thomas Aquinas College know that
the young men and women we recruit, above all else, should be well-suited
to the unique program of liberal education we offer.
Unlike career education - that is, training for a job - liberal
education is undertaken for learning's own sake, with the aim of
attaining an ever-deeper understanding of reality. It examines the
most important questions about nature, man, and God that endure
through every age. We believe this is best accomplished through
a systematic and dialectical study of seminal works, in various
fields, written by the finest minds that the world has ever known.
Moreover, we are convinced that students learn best when actively
engaged in their own education.
Thus, our curriculum is composed exclusively of the Great Books,
and all our classes are conducted as Socratic discussions, led by
faculty members.
Recruiting students who will thrive in this environment is a challenge.
To be sure, our applicants tend to be quite well-prepared with regard
to basic skills and concepts. They have sufficiently strong vocabulary,
mathematic, and reading comprehension abilities to earn impressive
SAT scores, and they have mastered classroom material well enough
to conquer the AP and Subject Tests. Yet, having been habituated
to reading textbooks, not original works, many of them are accustomed
to ingesting and repeating information - be it the Bill of Rights,
the periodic table, or trigonometric identities - without comprehending
the underlying reasons and causes. Relying on teachers and textbooks
as unquestionable authorities, they are frequently able to enunciate
a position but unable to defend it.
While these deficiencies would not prevent young people from obtaining
college-level training necessary for a future career, they could
pose serious impediments to success in the unique program of liberal
education that Thomas Aquinas College offers. In the give and take
of classroom discussions, our students are expected to analyze the
positions taken by the authors they read, to see the principles
underlying them, and to give an account of their own thoughts on
the matters at hand.
So the question for us has been this: how can we assess which
applicants will most likely have sustained success over four years?
Finding the Right Students
Among the tools our admissions team has developed to help ensure
that we retain the students we recruit, there is one that has proven
to be especially useful-- our High School Great Books Summer Program,
which was launched in 1996. Open to those who have completed their
junior year in high school, the program gives potential applicants
a firsthand experience of student life and learning. Participants
live in residence halls and meet each day in small groups, led by
our teaching faculty, to discuss works by authors such as Euclid,
Sophocles, Plato, and St. Thomas Aquinas. While discussions are
often rocky at the start, the quality soon improves as students
discover how to work with and learn from each other. By the end,
many participants come to see that what may have seemed daunting
at first is actually within their grasp.
The Results
The results of our summer program have exceeded our expectations.
The percentage of summer program students in our freshmen classes
has grown steadily and is now at 50 percent. Moreover, because of
the practice these students have had with the Socratic method, they
are able to help their classmates adjust quickly to the discussion
method. Perhaps most important is that our retention rate has risen
steadily, indicating that we really are finding the students best-suited
to our program.
A final note about the impact our High School Summer Great Books
Program has had on our popularity with applicants: U.S. News &
World Report recently highlighted Thomas Aquinas College when reporting
on college yield, i.e., the percentage of applicants accepted by
a college or university who enroll at that institution in the fall.
For the second year in a row, Thomas Aquinas College was ranked
#3 in this category among the country's best liberal arts schools,
topped only by the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Naval Academy.
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