Fortune Op-Ed
Ohio Wesleyan President Shares Thoughts on Serving the 'Exploratory Majority'
As Ohio Wesleyan University rolls out its new market identity of "America's University for Ambitious Self-Discovery," President Matt vandenBerg explains in a national Fortune op-ed why it matters.
vandenBerg's piece posted on Fortune.com on Oct. 23, the same day he announced the new strategic plan and market identity in an on-campus celebration. In the Fortune piece, titled "Let 17-year-olds change their minds. In the age of AI, it's their best career move," vandenBerg shares:
"The 'college years' are precisely when people figure out what they want to do with their lives. We ask students to declare a direction just before they're equipped to know it," vandenBerg writes, adding that up to 80% of students change their majors at least once.
And, he notes, artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the game again.
"Employers are searching for people who can ask good questions, read a room, weigh shades of gray, apply context to a hard decision, and write persuasively without a large language model (LLM) telling them what to say. Those uniquely human skills, and the arts, humanities, and social sciences are disproportionately good at building them," vandenBerg writes.
For that reason, vandenBerg also announced Oct. 23 that Ohio Wesleyan is "running back toward the arts and humanities while much of the sector runs away" by elevating the division into the Mecum College of Arts and Humanities, anchored by a $40 million commitment to permanently raise faculty pay.
"Seventeen-year-olds are still becoming who they'll be, and college is where much of that becoming happens," vandenBerg concludes, sharing that Ohio Wesleyan is building the future by "strategically repositioning as America's University for Ambitious Self-Discovery, and bringing the 'exploratory majority' along with us."
Read vandenBerg's full op-ed at Fortune.com.