Thinking of College? Consider Hillsdale, Where Classical Education Still Rules

It's one of the few remaining colleges not dominated by the Left.

You’ve probably heard what colleges are often like these days. Traditional staples of the liberal arts experience, such as Shakespeare and the Great Books, are being abandoned. Meanwhile, new courses based on gender, race, etc. proliferate, and in some cases are even required to graduate. Free speech is under siege, particularly for right-leaning students, who must live careful, politically closeted existences while facing a daily barrage of leftist indoctrination. Graduation is virtually assured thanks to grade inflation, but there is a common sense that standards have been diluted, and college degrees are accordingly being downgraded in importance by employers. In short, colleges aren’t what they used to be. The press is full of such depressing news, but a rare and happy exception to that trend is a little oasis of rationality known as Hillsdale College.

When you step onto Hillsdale campus, you are immediately greeted by statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and more of the same caliber. Unlike other colleges, Hillsdale isn’t tearing down such statues, but putting up more. Students aren’t rioting but studying. Professors aren’t agitating for radical social change but enthusiastically and competently teaching their chosen subjects. The campus itself is a tidy, elegantly landscaped patch of woodland adorned with a small array of academic buildings in the traditional style. It looks like just what it is: a traditional college that hasn’t changed much over the years, because it has stuck to its original purpose of propagating lasting classical values and knowledge of Western Civilization.

Indeed, in the last century, Hillsdale — which advertises itself simply as “a small Christian classical liberal arts college in southern Michigan” — wouldn’t have been considered terribly different from other colleges. But since then, much of the rest of the academic world has given way to the long march of Marxism, abandoning classical values in favor of a variety of left-wing fads; and that has made Hillsdale conservative by default. Traditional academia has been overwhelmed by a rising red sea, leaving Hillsdale one of the few bits of classical education still above water.

As the New Yorker put it with some exasperation, “Hillsdale College is known as a home for smart young conservatives who wish to engage seriously with the liberal arts. The Hillsdale education has several hallmarks: a devotion to the Western canon, an emphasis on primary sources over academic theory, and a focus on equipping students to be able, virtuous citizens. There is no department of women’s and gender studies, no concentrations on race and ethnicity. It’s a model of education that some scholars consider dangerously incomplete.” You can just see the bitter, chain-smoking New Yorker journalist hammering out those last words.

But does Hillsdale offer a quality education? Indeed, yes, it does. It’s a top-tier liberal arts college, ranked by US News at #48 out of 210 such colleges. The student faculty ratio is an incredible 8:1 ratio — this is not one of those academic mills where students sit in a class of hundreds, never really engaging with their professors. Here you get your money’s worth.

Of course, there are other colleges that appeal to right-leaning students, but among them Hillsdale is probably #1 in objective academic terms.

Reflecting that, it’s also challenging to get into, with a median SAT score of 1363 for incoming students. While tuition is substantially cheaper than that of many top-tier colleges, including room and board and net of aid and scholarships annual cost still averages around $33,000.

Hillsdale offers the usual majors, but in addition to that, all students are grounded in a structured common core of liberal arts classes that take about two years to complete. These include literature, philosophy, theology, history, fine arts, and natural sciences, as Hillsdale puts it “the best that has been thought and said.” This is a true classical education, in which graduates leave with a broader understanding of the world than more specialized programs would offer.

What kind of students attend Hillsdale? “We recruit by telling students how hard it is. We tell them it’s hell — and that’s what they want. They want to achieve something.” It’s that kind of student — those that want to be made into something great and are willing to put the effort in to make it happen. If that’s you, then Hillsdale might be your place. High school students wanting to get a taste of what Hillsdale is like, while also earning college credit, can take part in Hillsdale’s “High School Summer Study and Travel Programs.” You can learn more about Hillsdale College at its website.