Hi, Oles!
I've never had a blog. And, I'm not smart enough to set one up, but Nate Preisinger showed me how.
I was at a meeting recently where someone quoted a New York Times columnist as saying that blogs are like a labrador retriever: they're lots of fun but they aren't very smart and they demand all of your attention. (We have a lab--there may be some truth to that).
So, what does a college president publish in a blog? I thought I'd start with some interesting facts about what happens to our students after they graduate. I recently had occasion to review a mass of statistics about the college, and these are some of the facts that jumped out at me. I hope they interest you, not only because they show where your St. Olaf degree can take you but also because they show how highly a St. Oalf degree is valued outside the college.
St. Olaf is first among all liberal arts colleges nationwide in the number of students who study abroad. About 80 percent of each graduating class has studied abroad or off campus during students' time at St. Olaf. Perhaps because a global perspective is so thoroughly integrated into every aspect of the St. Olaf experience, on average, six St. Olaf students win a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship every year.
Identifying what every single graduate is doing after graduation is a very difficult task (have you every tried herding cats?), but we are able to account for about half of them in any given year. On average, we know that 65 percent of those graduates have jobs and another 29 percent are enrolled in post-graduate studies within six months of graduation. An additional 6 percent go into volunteer work, such as AmeriCorps or Lutheran Volunteer Corps.
The percent of our graduates who go on to graduate school is not trivial: according to the National Research Council's Survey of Earned Doctorates, in the period from 1995-2004 St. Olaf ranked eighth among over 500 baccalaureate colleges in the number of graduates who went on to earn doctoral degrees. As an undergraduate supplier of Ph.D.s, St. Olaf was also first among baccalaureate colleges in mathematics and statistics, second in religion and theology, third in art and music, third in foreign languages, fifth in life sciences and seventh in chemistry. I appreciate the value of these statistics about the success of our students in entering graduate programs because the dominance we exert as an undergraduate supplier of doctoral students represents a third-party endorsement of the quality of a St. Olaf education. Graduate schools have their pick of undergraduates to admit, and they clearly are glad to select Oles.
In light of our campaign to fund and build a new science center, it is particularly important to note that over one-third of our graduates earn their bachelor’s degree with at least one major in the sciences or mathematics. We confer more Bachelor of Arts degrees in mathematics, biology and chemistry than any college or university in the state, except for the University of Minnesota--Twin Cities.
Any questions, thoughts, or comments? You can reach me at anderson@stolaf.edu
