continued from p. 57
succeeding wildly, in the United States—the obvious solution is to send sons and daughters overseas. These students take every kind of examination imaginable, including the SATs and the International Baccalaureate (IB), to maximize their chances of getting a good, and preferably high-prestige, spot in the U.K., the U.S., Canada, or, more recently, Australia, Singapore, and several countries in the European Community. I happened to be at one high school in Mumbai on the day when the results of the Cambridge “A-level” exams were being released, and it was not a pretty scene: Parents were flooding into the school and demanding to know what their children’s prospects would be. Ironically, our challenge in India is almost identical to the growing one we face at home: how to convince families of the value of a traditional liberal arts education. Even as school principals and college counselors shake their heads in dismay, most Indian parents push their children to look GOUCHER QUARTERLY | SPRING 2013
first at engineering or business programs in the United States. There, as here, we will be competing for a thin slice of each year’s high school graduating class, and making the case that the purpose of higher education is greater than preparing to find a high-paying job and that Goucher is a good place to fulfill a broader view of life. We know that, given a chance, we can help Americans, Indians, and anyone else understand the link between a broad, values-based education—in which students learn to think, read, write, and speak critically; to work in groups to identify and solve problems; and to step outside their
58
own comfortable niche—and the universal aspirations of humanity. Stay tuned. Please.
Sanford J. Ungar | President
(L to R) Leah ‘Ellie’ Davidson Wolf ’14 and David Spivey ’14 examine coral, algae, and sponges off the coast of Roatan, Honduras. They are calculating the percent of coral cover on the reef as part of an assignment for their Intensive Course Abroad, ‘Tropical Marine Biology.’