Why liberal arts (and why Furman)?
Albert Einstein says this about the value of a liberal arts education: "It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not learning many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks."
Furman is among the top liberal arts colleges in the nation. We're not just tooting our own horn. Furman has been named to two recent best value lists by organizations that rank schools. The only South Carolina school to make the Princeton Review's list of 100 "Best Value Colleges" for 2009, Furman also made Kiplinger's "Top 50 Values in Liberal Arts Colleges." And last spring, Consumer Digest magazine ranked Furman the fifth best value among the nation's private liberal arts colleges.
Furman academics by the numbers
The headline of a recent story in USA Today read, “4-year colleges graduate 53 percent of students in 6 years.”
The story, which featured a report by the non-profit think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), went on to say that nationally, just 53 percent of students entering four-year colleges graduated within six years. The story was based on data reported to the Education Department by nearly 1,400 schools about full-time first-time students who entered in fall 2001.
Furman’s four-year graduation rate of 81 percent puts us at the top of public and private institutions deemed highly competitive in the South. Before picking a college, prospective students and their parents should thoroughly examine the school’s graduation rate, the AEI advises.
We’d agree with that. Most of the college rankings look at graduation rates to judge the effectiveness of institutions. They also look at the retention rate (how many students come back after freshman year) and alumni involvement to determine if students have a positive experience.
At Furman, 92 percent of freshmen return for their sophomore year (the national average for private colleges is 75 percent). And more than 45 percent of our alumni give back to Furman every year (as opposed to a national average of 28 percent).
So what does all that mean? Since 81 percent of our students graduate in four years, students (and their parents) don’t end up paying for five or six years of tuition. And it means that our students are having a good experience here—evidenced by the fact that they come back and they stay involved as Furman alumni.
