When Stephen R. Portch became chancellor of the University System of Georgia in 1994 he traveled the state, hearing, he says, the same pitch, again and again: Georgia needed a public liberal-arts college.
Without it, supporters of the idea argued, many top students were opting for private institutions or, worse, leaving the state to earn a liberal-arts degree. And for those who could not afford a costly private or out-of-state tuition, a liberal-arts education was simply out of reach.
Mr. Portch was sold, and so, too, were state lawmakers and members of the university system’s Board of Regents. “We have nationally recognized research universities, and we have schools that get graduates out into the work force,” says State Sen. Seth Harp, a Republican who leads the Georgia Senate’s Higher Education Committee. “We needed something else.”
In 1996 the regents designated Georgia College & State University, a regional institution in Milledgeville, the state’s antebellum capital and home of the writer Flannery O’Connor, as Georgia’s public liberal-arts college. Actually transforming it into one has been a slower process.
Over the past decade and a half, the college, whose faculty and administrators had lobbied for the new mission, has changed from commuter college to residential campus. Its academic profile has improved: In 1994 the average freshman came to Georgia College with a 2.9 high-school grade-point average and a 955 on the SAT. Today the entering student has a GPA of 3.3 and a SAT score of 1139, on average, the third highest of any public college in the state.
Before the mission change, “if you could fog a mirror, you were in the door,” says H.L. (Lee) Gillis, a professor of psychology.
But Mr. Gillis and other faculty members say the curriculum has not been as quick to adjust, in large part because a requirement that credits be transferable throughout the university system has given Georgia College little leeway to overhaul its course offerings. What’s more, professional degrees like nursing and management remain more popular than traditional liberal-arts majors like English or philosophy.
Stopping a Brain Drain
With gracious, colonnaded, red-brick buildings and a grassy Front Campus seemingly made for pickup football games, Georgia College, which opened in 1889 as a teaching college for women, looks the picture-perfect liberal-arts campus.
Cindy Peterson’s daughter, Katie, a recent graduate, “adored the college from the first moment we pulled up for a visit,” she says. Ms. Peterson, too, was smitten, by the personal attention and the close-knit atmosphere. “If I had a dozen kids, I’d encourage them all to go there,” she says of Georgia College, which has about 5,600 undergraduates.
The institution’s pull is not just emotional but academic. Classes are small, averaging 17 students, and students say professors are accessible, extending invitations to coffee or holding small-group seminars over the dinner table. The college is making a bid for top high-school graduates, offering honors courses and opportunities for freshman research. More than 90 percent of in-state freshmen at the institution qualify for the Hope Scholarship, the state’s full-tuition, merit-aid program.
Melanie Wooten, a junior, plans to go to medical school but says the idea of a liberal-arts curriculum appealed to her. “I love biology,” she says, “but so many other things interest me.”
Private liberal-arts colleges were out of Ms. Wooten’s price range. Her HOPE award pays for tuition and fees at Georgia College, and she covers the college’s $8,200 room and board through grants, loans, and a job as a campus tour guide.
Sandra J. Jordan, the provost, says Georgia College expands access to the liberal arts in another important way, through transfer agreements with community colleges. Ms. Jordan has visited several of the institution’s feeder colleges since becoming provost in July and has been working closely with nearby Georgia Military College, a two-year institution, to make sure their courses are complementary and that transferring students are fully prepared.
Dorothy Leland, Georgia College’s president, says the partnership with Georgia Military College is essential because the rise in academic standards that came with the new mission meant many local residents no longer qualified for admission. “We didn’t want members of the community to think they no longer had an institution that served them,” she says.
Recasting Courses
As the student body has changed, so has the faculty makeup. Additional funds from the state allowed the college to add about 70 new faculty members, and many of the new hires, like Julia Metzker, an associate professor of chemistry, were attracted specifically by the mission.
Ms. Metzker—who graduated from Evergreen State College, a public liberal-arts institution in Washington State—has been leading efforts to make Georgia College’s curriculum more liberal-artsy, organizing workshops to help faculty members recast courses. For example, this summer a science course for nonmajors, team-taught by a chemist and a sociologist, will examine the social and scientific implications of American food systems. Such efforts have been slow going, in part because any wholly new courses would need an OK from the Board of Regents.
“It’s easy to say you’re a public liberal-arts college,” Ms. Metzker says over coffee at a cozy downtown cafe, “but it’s not easy to do.”
This past fall, however, the regents approved a new core-curriculum policy, giving individual campuses greater freedom to design a general-education approach that fits their mission. Ms. Metzker is leading a committee examining Georgia College’s core course work.
That does not mean the college will jettison its pre-existing professional schools in business, education, and nursing. (For one, in a system where state support is allocated per student, it cannot afford to do so.)
Instead, Ms. Leland says the college is trying to “reimagine” liberal-arts education, giving students in professional-degree programs a more solid liberal-arts grounding and creating new programs that provide liberal-arts students with practical certifications that meet state economic needs. For example, the college plans to offer a new certificate program in nonprofit management aimed at arts majors and is working to steer promising science students into teaching careers.
The college has begun to track whether its graduates remain in Georgia, a measure of its economic impact. But with data from only a handful of graduating classes, the statistics are preliminary.
Thus far, Georgia College’s efforts have earned the support of powerful allies in business and politics like Erroll B. Davis Jr., the university system’s current chancellor and a former energy-company executive, and Mr. Harp, the state senator, who worked to restore a special fund for faculty salaries that the college cut from the state budget by Gov. Sonny Perdue, saving 24 positions.
Liberal-arts graduates, Mr. Harp says, are highly marketable. “Industry just gobbles up people like that,” he says.