<p>My guess is that someone in admissions at Kenyon has overreacted to the prevailing criticism that liberal arts graduates are unemployable. :)</p>
<p>I live in a developing country and interact a lot with social entrepreneurs who work for governmental agencies, NGOs and the consulting firms that connect them to each other. The one factor that these people seem to have in common, other than a high energy level and an overarching urge to do good, are their excellent and diverse educations. There’s no consistent thread to their undergraduate experiences. Large, small; State, private; elite, populist – they’re all churning out world-savers. </p>
<p>Social entrepreneurship has become, lately, the provenance of the political left so the conventional wisdom is the farther left a college leans the more opportunities. I’ve found, though, that that is not necessarily true. In the first place, ALL selective liberal arts colleges lean left, because the professors who set the agenda mostly all lean left. Some, like Swarthmore, Reed, Wesleyan, Oberlin are on the farside of activism; some like Williams, Kenyon, Bowdoin, Hamilton are more toward the middle, and less in your face. Some have a religious affiliation reflecting the original social entrepreneurs (not just Evangelical Christian but also Jewish and Catholic). Where I live the Islamic organizations are the supreme social entrepreneurs and social safety net.</p>
<p>But, to be sure, there is a strong current of social responsibility running through all of the academically rigorous LACs. Opportunities to engage abound, both during the school year and after graduation. Williams and Amherst, for example, may send a lot of kids to Wall Street, but at the same time the Peace Corps and Teach for America are primary post graduate employers. The overwhelming focus of Internships, holiday projects, visiting professors and speakers is altruism. The contradiction is that some of the biggest donors are those who have made a few Ben Franklins themselves. But the point is that once you get into the network, whether it’s big business or social entrepreneurship, doors open, and that’s what selective LACs do best.</p>
<p>What I think you have to be careful of in choosing a school is that you don’t get into a situation in which everyone agrees on every issue – social, economic, political, religious. It’s actually a good thing to hear the other side and in some environments this is verboten. This, to me, is the antithesis of the objective of higher education. That’s why in my observation the graduates of the more balanced institutions – either because they are larger or more middle-ish – adjust better to real world challenges and are ultimately more successful in making real change.</p>