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Undergraduate

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Liberal Arts Education
for a Lifetime

Emphasis on Values

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Environment

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Administratively Efficient

College "Family"
Commitment

Small By Choice Home

Small colleges engender enormous commitment from their "families."

Something special happens to people involved with small colleges.

• Alumni loyalty is fierce. Homecomings are important, contact throughout one's lifetime is common, annual giving levels are high.
• Parents together with students become engaged in the institution's life.
• A disproportionate share of alumni sons and daughters attend alma mater.
• Faculty maintain a commitment to the college first rather than to department or discipline.
• Boards of trustees, presidents, and other administrators - faced with the challenges of leading the institution in the face of unceasing difficulties - say almost in a common voice that the ideals and purposes of their institution are so vital, important, and necessary that they will do anything to preserve it, to protect it, to enable it to flourish.

That small colleges are of value to students is clear. Are small colleges also valuable to the nation - serving the needs of the real world of commerce, the professions, and society at large? The answer, quite simply, is yes. From family businesses to doctors and from engineers to the highest officers of the land, graduates of small colleges succeed.

Quite obviously, small colleges serve well the nation - and their communities. In doing so for two centuries, they have survived world wars, domestic strife, economic depression, and other crises. They have survived because they are resilient, creative, and necessary instruments of society, and because people of good will - business, civic, and political leaders - have believed in their intrinsic worth.

In this context, it becomes clear that colleges that choose to remain small in size do not do so by default or accident, but by self-determination - acting consciously to preserve the advantages that go with small size. And as the advantages of smallness become more widely appreciated, the predominate rationale for smallness becomes clearer - a high quality education readily accessible to the fullest range of students.

In sum, then, people who have been inoculated with the stuff of small colleges - be they student, faculty, alumnus, administrator, donor - have about them a special zeal. Its intensity knows no bounds, its conviction is vivd and visible, and it is one reason that small independent colleges in America have survived and prospered for two centuries - and why they will for the next two centuries, too.

The Council of Independent College (CIC) One Dupont Circle, Suite 320 Washington, D.C. 20036
Photos © 2000 Greenville College