Why Should You Consider A Private College or University?

The opportunity to study at one of South Carolina's independent colleges is an exceptional one. There are significant reasons why your college planning should include these dynamic and exciting institutions.

First is the chance to build a firm liberal arts and sciences base for your education. Your study will include the broad themes of the humanist, the social scientist, and the scientist. You will develop an understanding of the major ideas, individuals, and works of art and science that have shaped our tradition and our world. While studying the liberal arts, you will also be encouraged to explore new areas of knowledge that you may never have imagined.

As you survey the broad domain of the liberal arts and build a factual basis for your knowledge, you also develop essential skills that you will carry with you the rest of your life: the ability to think critically, to analyze a problem and break it down into its constituent parts; the ability to write clearly and convincingly and to communicate effectively with other people; and the ability to express yourself orally in a similar fashion. These skills: thinking, writing, and speaking, will serve you well and prepare you as a lifelong learner.

Running parallel to the skills of analysis and communication is one's understanding how other people think and approach problems. Because the liberal arts curriculum is a broad one, students take courses in a number of disciplines and soon come to understand the different ways in which an idea, topic, or event can be analyzed and how to formulate the relevant questions. One becomes adept at seeing how various disciplines relate to one another and how different cultures intersect with one another, and is able to find common ground while still respecting significant differences. Because training takes place in small classes with an average 16.8 to 1 student faculty ratio, liberal arts graduate develops the insights that enable them to relate naturally to people different from themself and to approach technical and social problems with understanding and with confidence.

Hands-on learning of career skills is possible for students at private liberal arts colleges through small classes and laboratories, small faculty-student ratios, student participation on campus, and opportunities for independent studies and externships. A recent term for our students included apprenticeships in medicine, museum curatorship, guidance counseling, law, athletic training, education and special education, business, pharmacy, accounting, pollution control, minis try, physical therapy, marine biology, genetic engineering, mental health, banking, mental retardation, coaching and a myriad of other fields. Their work took them to medical centers, museums, schools, CPA firms, banks, universities and businesses in several states.

The liberal arts course of study at a small independent college also provides you the opportunity to develop interpersonal and leadership skills as you interact with one another in the laboratory and the classroom, while focusing on the important ideas and events that have defined our common experience as citizens of the late twentieth century. The liberal arts experience also emphasizes the importance of informed and responsible leadership as one who will become the worker, citizen and leader of tomorrow. A liberal arts education teaches one to think and to act, and to do so with others in teams, in groups, and as a community.

Through such programs as Special Olympics, PhoneFriend for latch- key children, sponsorship of blood banks, Adopt-A-Highway, and Habitat for Humanity, students at private colleges serve their communities and prepare for lives of civic responsibility. As a faculty member at a private college points out, "Service delivery is a part of education. We're trying to make the community better. At the same time, students are taking what they've learned in the classroom and applying it in real situations. They're learning to deal with the public and deal with each other."

Each of the private colleges and universities in South Carolina has its own wealth of stories of unique hands-on experience for students. Incorporation of research, independent studies, and externships into the curricula of the institutions is made easy by the small classes, flexible academic calendars, and faculty dedicated to teaching and involving students as partners in research.

Education at an independent college can change your life. By providing you with a broad background, it will prepare you for the specialized role you will play in our global society. By opening your eyes to new ideas and fields of exploration, it will introduce you to new perspectives and ways to solve problems. By introducing you to dynamic and diverse fellow students and faculty members, it will provide you with a set of relationships that will last a lifetime.


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