Academic Life
As students advance through their academic career, the information in this section will help direct them to opportunities and resources to support and encourage their explorations and success.
Earlham's Approach to Academic Learning
Earlham College is a residential college of the liberal arts and sciences that prides itself on offering an outstanding undergraduate educational experience. We provide for all of our students the opportunity to engage in an extremely challenging and stimulating environment — many different environments, in fact — as our students grow as perceptive individuals and citizens of an increasingly interrelated world.
The liberal arts experience is one that involves exposure to a variety of different kinds of studies, studies that differ in discipline (e.g., history as distinct from languages) as well as studies that differ in methodology (e.g., mathematics as distinct from philosophy, studio art as distinct from chemistry). Although students may be more or less certain when they come to Earlham about what they want to study and what they want to focus upon as their majors while they are here, experience shows us that this really is very fluid, indeed. "Typical" Earlham students change their majors several times in the course of their time here, and this is very much as it should be. As students meet new disciplines, new questions, new approaches to framing questions, and new ways of responding to questions, it is easy for us to imagine them wanting to pursue these new and stimulating lines of inquiry.
Several characteristics of an Earlham education are at the core of the Earlham experience. Certainly one of the central dimensions of an Earlham education involves an outstanding classroom experience. This is the fact whether the classroom experience in question is in the physics lab, a music recital, a language discussion group, or an economics seminar. Our small classes mean that students will receive their professors' attention, will know other students in their classes, and will have the opportunity to interact in a meaningful way with both their faculty and their fellow students.
The experiential dimension of an Earlham education means that students do more than sit in classrooms. They are out in communities, near and far, in Richmond, Indiana, and in Dakar, Senegal, from New York to New Zealand, from El Paso, Texas, to Tokyo, Japan. An experiential approach to education does not diminish the importance of what takes place in the classroom, but it suggests that, in addition to that experience, our students want more from outside of the classroom, and they want to see their newly-found classroom knowledge applied to the "real world" around them.
The international dimension of an Earlham education recognizes that Earlham under-stands that we are a part of a much larger international community. We have an obligation to prepare our students not only for the responsibilities of being citizens of the United States, but also to face the responsibilities of being citizens of an increasingly diverse, yet interconnected, world. In the 2007 report of the Institute of International Education, Earlham College was ranked second in the nation in the proportion of students studying overseas. Not only do the vast majority of our students participate in an overseas studies program once, but a substantial number of our students study abroad more than once. There are very few experiences that educate as much as travel. With its emphasis on experiencing other languages and cultures, seeing oneself as "the other," and learning to question our assumptions by seeing through the eyes of other cultures, the travel experience is extraordinarily valuable and is a central institutional goal.
The collaborative approach to an Earlham education recognizes that all of the members of the Earlham community are students, and we are all teachers. Students and teachers work closely together in the educational process at Earlham. We are proud that Earlham ranks in the very top group of all institutions of higher education in the nation — major research universities as well as small liberal arts colleges — in the proportion of our students who go on to earn a Ph.D. We believe that this is because our students have the opportunity to do hands-on research while they are at Earlham, at the sides of their professors, and they have the opportunity to see close up what the quest for knowledge is all about. This generates in many of our students a quest for more education, which in itself leads to a graduate school experience.
A final key dimension of an Earlham education involves the development of values, or character development, as part of the undergraduate experience. We believe that a key characteristic of the educational experience involves the creation of meaning in one's life, and the cultivation of values, and of congruence between values and actions. This has long been a key dimension of the Earlham ethic and continues to be central today. Liberal education has, at its heart, in addition to everything else, the task of knowing oneself and using such self-understanding as a foundation for making choices in one's life — not to mention working more effectively to improve the world.
Earlham is indeed a remarkable setting for what many of our students characterize as a transforming experience that takes place at a crucial point in their lives. A liberal arts background is more than being able to show off a collection of facts. It is about understanding, flexibility, adaptability and appreciation. Earlham graduates will, we are confident, have a powerful influence upon the society in which they live.
