It was a pleasure to have met you and to have had a chance to talk to you, Stephen Bayer and Kay Fairs about Swarthmore. The exchange of ideas on Wednesday night was most interesting and certainly useful particularly as regards visibility of the College outside the borders of the United States. I was happily surprised by reports of the development of the arts at Swarthmore.

It is a good thing that Swarthmore undergrads range far and wide in their efforts to make a positive impact on the world. However, in the light of our brief discussion of civility, I would hope that some of our students would look to making a difference close to home in the light of the obvious breakdown in both trust and language at the level of our political leadership. Perhaps they do!

Frankly, I doubt that old timers such as myself have much to add to the dialogue; but I shall reflect on what we discussed and will write to you in due course.

Best regards and bon retour,

I agree that Swarthmore not be a likely price competitor for in-state public tuition. Having visited places like UVA during a recent college search that made me a Swarthmore parent, I would caution not to over-romanticize the education at large state schools, even very good ones. For example, Swarthmore could save considerable money by having its discussion sections led by grad student TAs, too. There are real differences in a public university scale educational offering and an interactive, boutique scale program. I would consider Virginians among the four luckiest in the in-state public education draw, along with North Carolina, Michigan, and California. These schools, however, all under extreme financial duress. Berkeley, for example, routinely has lectures courses with over 1000 students. That, IMO, is no way to teach undergrads.

Comparing publics to Swarthmore is difficult because of the way numbers are reported, but here are a few key indicators from the 2009-2010 Common Data Set filings for UVA and Swarthmore:

Total undergrad Enrollment:

Swarthmore: 1,525
Univ. Virginia: 15,208

Tuition, room, board, and fees (out of state):

Swarthmore: $49,578
Univ. Virginia: $40,290

Institutional need and non-need based grant aid:

Swarthmore: $23,718,392 ($15,553 per undergrad)
Univ. Virginia: $33,674,560 ($2,214 per undergrad)

The average student at Swarthmore paid $32,000 room, board, tuition, a nd fees last year. I can't give you an average for UVA, but it's almost certain that the average out-of-state student at UVA last year paid more than the average Swarthmore student. For example, UVA has no institutional aid for international students.

Swarthmore spent over $80,000 per student in operating expenses last year. Providing an $80,000 educational program for an average cost of $32,000 is high value and the reason that the application numbers are at all time historic highs.

I would like to take issue with one of President Chopp's answers, and that is about Swarthmore's competition. She noted that Swarthmore competes with students primarily with Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford. I'm sure this is technically true. But in a larger sense, Swarthmore's competition is not the Ivy League, Williams, Amherst, or even the great state schools like Berkeley or Michigan.

Swarthmore's competition is Google, Amazon, Apple and the New York Times. It is McKinsey, Microsoft, and The Atlantic. It is Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and the ACLU. There was a time when liberal arts colleges and universities were the centers of enlightened and progressive thinking in America. In the hard sciences, this is still the case. In the social sciences and the humanities, it no longer is. You can learn about Shakespeare by taking a Shakespeare seminar at Swat, or you can watch a lot of Shakespeare movies from Netflix. That won't be as academically rigorous as the seminar, but it's also about 1/100th the price. But combine Netflix with a degree from the University of Virginia, and there is suddenly not much difference between UVA and Swarthmore.

This is important because it speaks to the issue of cost versus value. Swarthmore costs a lot more than a good state school, and implicit in the idea of Swarthmore costing so much more is the idea that it is a better value. But measured in strictly economic terms, I highly doubt that Swarthmore delivers a better value than a good state school. There may be some Swarthmore students who make more money after graduating from Swat than they would have if they had gone to a good state school. But I don't know any. Pretty much everyone that I know who graduated from Swarthmore is making a good, solid, average middle class living. Most of them are pretty happy with their Swarthmore experiences (with some exceptions, including me). But none of them paid $50,000 a year.

Since I arrived in July, we have been hard at work to resolve an $8 million budget gap, the result of the Great Recession. This past weekend the Board of Managers approved a set of recommendations presented by the Ad Hoc Financial Planning Group. More information about this plan can be found here.

In addition to resolving the budget shortfall, we have also been engaged in a search for a new Dean of Students, a critical member of Swarthmore's senior leadership team. We hope to have a new Dean in place by the summer of 2010. The Dean will be asked to provide leadership and direction to continue to enhance the overall quality of student life, academic advising and support, and residential education at Swarthmore.

In addition to these concrete initiatives, next year the College will undertake a strategic direction-setting process which will help shape the future of Swarthmore. We will do so only by engaging with our on campus community, as well as our alumni body. I have also articulated a number of priorities in the previous blog entry which you might find interesting.

Sincerely,

Rebecca Chopp

My question is simple. What are your plans for the future of Swarthmore? When will we see tangible (or intangible) results?