But admissions director Alex Castalan has a very different answer in mind. “Someone who is a bit of a self-starter.,” says Castalan. “We provide a lot of support but we also attract someone who is entrepreneurial and a go-getter combined with a lot of different interests.”
The answers were similar when I talked recently to admissions counselors from Kalamazoo College and Allegheny College: “Involved. Intellectually curious. Passionate about community service,” says Allegheny’s Kelsey Reisinger.
All three colleges, along with 37 others, continue to benefit from their inclusion in a little book that has had a big impact since it was first came out in 1996: Colleges That Change Lives.
Though its author, Loren Pope (who was 86 at the time of its publishing), died in 2008, the book is a phenomenon that has spawned a non-profit with its own acronym, CTCL, that promotes the colleges, even going around the country with its CTCL college fair. Pope’s family has a foundation that retains the rights to the book and its content, including decisions about whether to add or drop any colleges from the original list (added have been St. Mary’s of California, Willamette University, University of Puget Sound, and Hillsdale College).
Pope looked for small liberal arts colleges with higher admission rates (most are 50% or above) whose mission he saw as educating students without elitism. “A good school is an extended family,” he said. “The learning is collaborative, not competitive. It’s a community of learning, and values are central — that’s important,” Pope said in a 2007 New York Times interview, one year before his passing.
To that end, the list is diverse, from liberal schools such as Reed College (Oregon) to the ultra-conservative (Hillsdale, in Michigan), and everything in between.
At Beloit, set on a bucolic hill (or what passes for a hill in the farmland of northern Illinois/south-central Wisconsin), learning takes place amongst a student body who “really wants to be here,” in Castalan’s words. “We’re very clear about who we are,” he says, attracting the type of student who speaks in class and enjoys both independent study and collaborative work, research and writing. There is close work with professors, who also serve as advisers, a high faculty retention rate, and careful attention to class selection, As at Yale and Harvard, students have a one-week “shopping period” at the beginning of each term to try out classes and see what “fits.”
Yes, econ and biology are two of the most popular majors, but add to that anthropology and creative writing, religious studies and international and public health (a popular pre-med track). Self-designed majors and interdisciplinary majors are common, too, and not ones you’d quite expect: Castalan mentions one physics and dance major, and another econ/religious studies.
Beloit, Kalamazoo and Allegheny acknowledge the significant impact the book has had on their schools, but as Allegheny’s Reisinger says, “We were already doing the things to attract students, or we wouldn’t have been in the book in the first place.”
They are small schools, often “in the middle of nowhere” (though Castalan reminds this city slicker that Beloit is in “a region of 500,000 people”), and the moniker “quirky” is often bestowed. But CTCL’s attract the student bodies that embody their missions.
“Students don’t get bored here,” Beloit’s Castalan muses. “It’s a good place for a busy student. There’s a very happy person who goes here.”