Promoting student success is a pillar of our academic plan and is central to both the President’s Strategic Action Plan and the Provost’s Academic Excellence Goals. While I believe that our liberal arts education is outstanding and offers students the pathway to fulfilling life and career success, the changing landscape of higher education, together with the changing needs of our students, require that we be more deliberate in communicating the value of the liberal arts education.
In Spring 2018 we convened a task force to work toward identifying and describing the core competencies, or what are often referred to as “transferable skills,” that students acquire by graduation. To successfully attract, retain and timely graduate students, we must help them understand, and effectively communicate for themselves, the variety of valuable skills that they acquire and will bring to their choice of career.
The task force* identified 17 candidate competencies from a much longer list that was created from a variety of different sources including competencies identified by other colleges and universities (e.g., the University of Minnesota, the University of Texas Austin, and Middlebury College) and by businesses and business organizations such as the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).
The Task Force has surveyed CAS faculty, Students and Alumni asking which of the 17 competencies best reflect our liberal arts education. In February 2018 the Task Force will produce the final list of competencies. The goal will be to communicate these competencies and incorporate them into our curriculum.
| Competency | Description |
| Active Citizenship & Community Engagement | The development of consciousness about one’s roles in and active engagement with the communities in which one is involved. Building an awareness of how communities impact individuals, and how, in turn, individuals impact, serve, and shape communities. |
| Analytical & Critical Thinking | The ability to explore issues, ideas, knowledge, evidence, and values before accepting or formulating an opinion or conclusion. Building awareness of one’s personal biases. |
| Applied Problem Solving | The ability to design, evaluate, and implement a workable strategy to achieve a goal by identifying constraints, generating alternative courses of action, and devising criteria to evaluate alternatives. |
| Written and Oral Communication | The ability to listen with objectivity, speak effectively and write persuasively. |
| Creativity, innovation and creative problem-solving | The ability to generate new, varied, and unique ideas, and make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. This includes learning to take risks and overcome internal struggles to expose one’s creative self in order to bring forward new work or ideas. |
| Digital literacy | The ability to leverage exiting digital technologies ethically and efficiently to solve problems, complete tasks, and accomplish goals. |
| Ethical Reasoning & Decision Making | The ability to recognize ethical issues arising in a variety of settings or social contexts and to act accordingly by assessing one’s own personal and moral values and perspectives as well as those of other stakeholders and integrating them into an ethical framework for decision making. |
| Global/Intercultural Fluency and Foreign Language Skills | The ability to value, respect, learn from, and communicate with diverse cultures, races, ages, genders, sexual orientations and religions. |
| Human Relations and Interpersonal Skills | The ability to keep maintain group cooperation and support, interact effectively with peers, superiors and subordinates, understand the feelings of others and express one’s feelings appropriately |
| Information literacy | The development of the ability to recognize when information is needed and to locate, evaluate, and effectively use the information. |
| Knowledge Integration/ Synthetic and Systems thinking | The ability fuse information and concepts from multiple disciplines and to combine ideas into a complex whole. |
| Personal and Interpersonal Skills | The development of the ability to juggle multiple demands for commitment of time, energy, and resources and learn from one’s experience and the experience of others.
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| Quantitative Reasoning/Applied Data interpretation | The ability to apply basic mathematical skills to the interpretation of data to solve a disciplinary problem. |
| Research and Investigation Skills | The ability to use a variety of sources of information and apply a variety of methods to test the validity of data. |
| Teamwork, Collaboration & Leadership | The ability to build and maintain collaborative relationships based on the needs, abilities, and goals of each member of a group. |
| Innovation and Creativity | The ability to generate new, varied, and unique ideas; make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas; propose alternatives without being constrained by established approaches; and to take risks and overcome internal struggles to expose one’s creative self in order to bring forward new work or ideas. |
| Career Management | The active engagement in the process of exploring possible careers, gaining meaningful experience, and building skills that help one excel after college and lead to employment or other successful post-graduation outcomes. |
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