Our data provide one clue as to the educational environments most conducive for creative minds to develop: the relatively high number of Fellows who graduated from liberal arts colleges. Liberal arts colleges are distinctively American institutions, typically small, that focus on undergraduate education. Less than two percent of U.S. college graduates graduated from a liberal arts college, but 14 percent of MacArthur Fellows did. Liberal arts colleges are a diverse group of institutions. Some are highly selective; others are not. The category includes women’s colleges like Barnard College, which has produced ten MacArthur Fellows, including Irene Winter, an art historian who studied anthropology as an undergraduate. The category also includes church-affiliated colleges like Siena College in Albany, New York, where writer William Kennedy graduated, and historically black colleges like Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, where physician and scientist Donald Hopkins graduated. Liberal arts colleges share a common emphasis on close faculty-student interaction, quality teaching, and a curriculum grounded in the liberal arts. (In our data, we identified liberal arts colleges using the Carnegie classification system.)
By exploring why liberal arts colleges have produced a disproportionate share of MacArthur Fellows, we might gain insights into how to incubate exceptional creativity more broadly. It seems unlikely that liberal arts colleges admit more creative people than other colleges and universities. They rely on the same admissions criteria as other schools – standardized test scores, grade point average, and teacher recommendations – and those traditional metrics probably exclude those with the most creative potential. It is more likely that private liberal arts colleges have produced more than a proportionate share of Fellows because of the educational environment at those institutions. Something must be more likely to happen to a student at these institutions than at other institutions that allows creativity to flourish. I argue that something is a true liberal education.
The prerequisites for the exceptional creativity that characterize MacArthur Fellows align closely with the definition of a liberal education. Creativity requires basic competency in a broad array of disciplines, advanced competency in one or more fields, and the ability to make connections across fields so as to pose new questions or formulate new answers. It requires exposure to diverse perspectives, methodologies, and concepts of evidence. A liberal education equips individuals with the ability to deal with complexity and change. A high priority is placed on the development of critical thinking skills and the abilities to distinguish opinions from facts and to discern good ideas from bad. Ellen Browning Scripps, for whom Scripps College is named, may have best summed up the goals of a liberal education: “The paramount obligation of a college is to develop in its students the ability to think clearly and independently and the ability to live confidently, courageously, and hopefully.”
