I was given the honor of welcoming the new class, our 100th class, of first-year students to Loyola. Here is what I said (yes, it’s a tad long, but, hopefully, entertaining and informative for you)….
On behalf of the offices of admissions and financial aid and scholarships, welcome to your enrollment at Loyola University New Orleans.
Since I am new to Loyola, I have not yet received the full benefit of observing all of you and learning about you as the effulgent multi-dimensional individuals that you are.
But, I have been reading about you.
You’re scholars, musicians, debaters, test-takers, and bankers. You are sculptors, vegetarians, libertarians, daughters of librarians, friends of octogenarians. You are composers, hitters and closers, You are Southerners, Northerners, New Englanders, Californioners, Midwesterners, New Orleanians, Europeans, Nicaraguans, Hondurans, Chicagoans, and Puerto Ricans. You are from places like Taipei, Taiwan, Thailand, Texas, Tennessee, TexArKana, Thibodaux, Towson, MD (home of Michael Phelps), and Tampa, to name a few. You are valedictorians, salutatorians, and El Salvadorans.
You are recyclers and rebuilders, soon to be voters and certain contributors to the great debates of the day.
If the weight of your paper records offers any guide, it sometimes does, you have an awful lot of hype to live up to.
37 percent of you are students of color
30 percent of you are first generation college students
Your average GPA is a 3.7
Your average SAT is a 1295
60 percent of you graduated in the top quarter of your class.
You create, explore, write, sing, PRODUCE at unprecedented levels. You are accomplished, you are intellectually curious, and you are passionate about social justice.
Fortunately, you have chosen a great medium in which to express yourself.
This University is among the most creative in the United States. The world is literally our blackboard, as curricula engage the wider community in exciting and purposeful ways.
You are a special class, our Centennial class, and you own the responsibility and the honor of transforming first yourselves and then the world. And, there is no question that you are up to the challenge.
And I issue this challenge to you not as a composite, not as a mean, not as a profile, but to each of you as individuals.
You see, so much of my work as an enrollment manager is tied up in predicting the behavior of groups of people, often based upon what they look like, strictly on paper. We pour over lists and lists of names, event schedules, past enrollment histories, and thousands of pieces of data, to cull from them some clue as to how many great students it might be possible to recruit for the fall. We eat, sleep, drink SAT and ACT scores, rank in class, we try to predict the future. We guess the enrollment.
We hunker down in our offices, fingers flailing over calculators or clicking with Reggie Bush like rapidity through screens of excel-sheet-synthesized data. As statisticians, tacticians, and mathematicians. We predict your attributes, your likes and dislikes, your housing preferences, and your academic interests. We predict the future.
How dare we.
Statistics alone did not bring you to this place, nor did they retain the sophomores, juniors, and seniors who are living in our residence halls and sitting in our classrooms. Maybe the messages in our literature sparked an interest, or maybe guidance counselors put in some good words, but none of these can measure the nice to see ya’s and the how are ya’s on a campus. None of these accurately predict the charisma and brilliance of a faculty member in that-one-on-one meeting and none can perfectly pinpoint that one element of atmosphere–palm trees, Audubon park, 70 degree weather in December–that brought you here.
We cannot predict the characters who will emerge from each class, the friendships that will explode across the campus, or the sudden light that goes on when someone arrives at the intersection of theory and practice. The quality of any experience always trumps the quantity of the so-called measurable variables that comprise it.
The HORRIBLE thing about statistics, as purposeful as they are, is that they tend to suggest that one set of behavior predicts the next set and we take that suggestion as an absolute. The A+ high school student will be an A+ college student. Not necessarily. The student from a single parent home will do worse than the one from a 2 parent home. Not necessarily. The first-generation college student cannot compete on the same level as the one from the family who has gone to College since before the American revolution. Don’t you dare believe that.
Loyola is a progressive, creative place; our students are not statistics; we do not expect that they will emulsify into a bland stew of sameness. Achievement, Progress, Growth, Enlightenment, and GREATNESS are not faits accompli; they are not givens. They are choices. Choices made by each of you.
So, yes, I will go back to my office today, look at a few more spreadsheets, try to set up the meetings that will expose a new iteration of college students to what we have here. Most of my time will be spent in my world of funky math and the marketing of messages. It is good work; I do like numbers and we have great stories to tell but it is only half the picture.
What I will enjoy most is when you surprise us in the form of a nuanced performance, a staggeringly well-written essay, an insight during a class discussion, a buzzer beater from half court, a marketing plan that could turn around an entire industry, a brilliant speech, a perfect LSAT score, an astonishing act of kindness.
What I will enjoy most about my work is the fact that this community is an amazing place to belong to. Its kindness, generosity, dynamism, and infectious good will are borne of the spirit of our students who are more than aware that they are not just part of this culture, but they help to create and maintain it. And you, our Centennial class, are among the most creative in our history. Believe the hype.
Today is the dawning of your masterpiece. Behold the creative campus, your canvas.
Thank you, and welcome.
