When one thinks of geographic concentrations of greatness in American higher education, one probably starts with Massachusetts, which is probably the home to more top-flight elite private schools per square mile than any other state. After all, in a relatively small area are located the likes of such great universities as Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Tufts, Brandeis, etc., as well as some extraordinarily highly regarded liberal-arts colleges, including top ranked Williams and Amherst.
Thinking of public universities, people look to California with its world-class University of California, as well as its large network of community colleges and other state universities. Rivaling California qualitatively is Virginia, whose top state schools, such as the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary, are amongst the nation’s best by almost any reckoning.
But I think a state that is equally extraordinary in its higher-education offerings is Kentucky, in the sense that it offers some very high-quality education in a relatively sparsely populated, low-income environment (only five states, as of 2009, had per capita incomes lower than the Bluegrass State). In speaking of Kentucky, I am not thinking about the large public schools like the University of Kentucky or the University of Louisville, but rather smaller liberal-arts colleges located in poor, sparsely populated areas with generally low levels of educational attainment.
First, there is Berea College. I first learned about Berea a couple of decades ago, when my wife Karen, a high-school guidance counselor, extolled its virtues, as it had given an outstanding education to a low-income student in the poor school district in which she counseled. The student went on to a successful military career and like many others, owed much of her success to the fine training at Berea. Berea is essentially free to students–with a catch: They have to work in college facilities, lowering the cost of offering the education. The school uses its considerable endowment to lower costs to students, not shower resources on the other major claimants of resources within the college community–faculty, administrators, alumni wanting fancy athletic facilities, etc. They have been single minded in their devotion to an affordable education of high quality for lower-income students–and have been quite successful. In terms of “bang for the buck,” Berea is hard to beat.
But Berea is not unique. Take Centre College, located in a poor area like Berea, where per capita income is not only well below the already low Kentucky average, but far lower than that of America’s lowest-income state, Mississippi. Danville, Kentucky is, I am told, a lovely town, but it is not Boston or the San Francisco metro area in terms of affluence, availability of outside amenities, proximity to kids with a superb secondary education, etc. Yet Centre offers a first-rate education, and deeply cares about its students. I have met with top college officials, including its excellent president John Roush, and in my role of helping Forbes magazine rank colleges, have observed that Centre is one of the finest schools in the U.S. Forbes ranks Centre as one of the nation’s top 20 liberal-arts colleges, above such famous Ivy League universities as Columbia, Cornell, or the University of Pennsylvania. Its secret, I think, is an unrelenting, laser-like focus on offering a superior experience for students. To overcome provincialism, the vast majority of students study abroad, some on trips led by President Roush himself. And it additionally overcomes geographic isolation by putting serious dollars into bringing in talent from the outside, including a performing-artist series that puts the one at my much larger university (Ohio University) to shame.
Let me briefly mention also the oldest liberal-arts college west of the Alleghenies, Transylvania College, also a high-quality school. It is located in decidedly more affluent Lexington, a big advantage, but still nothing in terms of money or influence compared with many of the towns housing, say, Ivy League schools.
Walking around the rich private schools (I did so recently at Princeton and Dartmouth), the places exude wealth. That is not the case at Berea and Centre, yet when one looks at the “bottom line”–the quality of the educational experience, they do remarkably well. If the Forbes rankings are about right, the qualitative difference between Centre and Dartmouth colleges is trivial. Centre, however, shows that it does not take endowments of a million dollars or more per student to create educational excellence. The nation could learn a lot by looking at “best practices” at these fine Kentucky schools.
