Rose Bialk/The Mossy Log
In the last two years, it feels that the academic profile of Lewis & Clark has been on the decline. According to LC’s institutional research, applications to the College of Arts & Sciences have decreased from a peak of 6,660 in 2022 to 5,804 in 2025, a 13% decline. LC is no outlier in this aspect — between the ongoing demographic cliff of high school graduates and the broader decline in interest in the liberal arts, colleges nationwide are competing to attract an increasingly small group of prospective students.
To remedy this crisis, LC has put forward its list of Strategic Imperatives designed in part to make the college more enticing to prospective students. The three imperatives include developing leaders, enhancing the college’s regional impact and fueling lifelong success. While these are admirable aspirations and likely will improve the experience of current students, I do not believe that they will provide the immediate return on investment that the college is seeking.
There is an easier way for the college to resolve its enrollment crisis: it needs to both assert its own unique identity and prove that successful people are cultivated on its campus. There is plenty of proof that this is a solid strategy — after all, the broad decline in enrollment does not hold for every individual college or university. In fact, High Point University (HPU), a North Carolina-based university famous for its outlandish marketing campaign, has seen a sharp increase in enrollment since it began this strategy — in 2025, they enrolled their largest freshman class in history with 1,671 students, a 9.4% increase from their previous year. While we certainly do not have to mimic its proudly elitist chime of “experiencing luxury,” it serves as a testament to how marketing can transform interest in an institution.
But rather than thinking about the present, the administration is thinking too far into the future. The initiatives they outline, including the recently-approved data science major, a paid internship program and a brand new environmentalism center (which notably has been proposed with no timeline for its construction), are not what could be most conducive to sell prospective students — and, perhaps more importantly, their parents — on the possibility of a successful career after graduation. These programs are forward looking, providing new resources for hypothetical future student success with little evidence offered to parents that the resources will actually benefit their student’s future.
People rely on proof, not promises, when making a financial decision as large as choosing which college to attend, and liberal arts colleges currently have a terrible reputation on that front. Article after article discusses the death of the liberal arts, often focusing on its return on investment. In this sense, I can understand why the college would jump to the conclusion that investing in brand new ROI-increasing programs will remedy this problem. But by doing this, they are misunderstanding the actual end goal of those programs: a better reputation.
If LC wants to effectively set itself apart from generic liberal arts college #96, its main priority should be to cultivate and assert a distinctive identity. For HPU, that was building a reputation of private wealth and exclusivity, but there is a closer example to LC across the river. The driving factor behind public interest in our neighbor, Reed College, is its reputation as “one of the most intellectual colleges in the country” (as per its own website). In case the fact that this comes from Reed’s website was not enough to tip you off, this reputation is not entirely organic. It has been carefully crafted by the school’s Office of Strategic Communications & Marketing, which works with the PR firm RW Jones Agency — the same firm employed by the California Institute of the Arts, Colorado College and the University of Maryland.
This investment has paid dividends for Reed. While the college trended around 5,000 applications per cycle in the 2010s, it reached a peak of 10,045 in 2023 — again, during a period of a supposed decline in interest in the liberal arts. This is because Reed has been able to successfully recontextualize its history and increase its institutional profile to being a prestigious, near-Ivy institution of elite historical repute, despite its acceptance rates hovering around 70% in the 1990s. If there is any case study for the power of reputation and branding, LC’s greatest rival should be proof enough of its merit.
It is not as if LC has no substrate to work with in order to craft a reputation as a prestigious, desirable institution. We are a college that has educated Rhodes Scholars, U.S. ambassadors and award-winning authors. Some of our more prestigious alumni include Kate Brown JD ’85, the former governor of Oregon; Matt Wuerker ’79, a Pulitzer-winning cartoonist, founding member of Politico and former Pioneer Log staff member; and Sagala Ratnayaka ’93, the former chief of staff and national security advisor for Sri Lanka. We also have an excellent network of alumni in a variety of fields — including, as The Mossy Log has discovered through our own outreach, in journalism.
Yet this network is hardly used in the college’s communications; alumni profiles appear primarily in LC’s magazine (which, to be blunt, few read outside of alumni themselves), left languishing on glossy paper which sits in the mostly empty newsstand outside of the Troom. While Reed’s institutional research web page keeps track of the number of its students that go on to win prestigious awards, from Fulbright grants to Marshall and Rhodes scholarships, LC’s does not. We are leaving lots of tools to increase the college’s prestige on the table, and it is causing our reputation to decline.
The college also has a rich legacy that lies unused by our marketing team. Despite LC’s expansive history, dating all the way back to 1867, LC students live largely unaware of it. It is not common here for students to look at successful alumni, symposia and student movements of the past to motivate themselves to higher aspirations. They do not feel like a part of a continuous intellectual history. Students graduate without a clear sense of academic identity, only being able to describe their alma mater as a liberal arts college.
We are an institution that once hosted the likes of MLK Jr. in 1961 and President Gerald Ford in 1976, all with a reputation for its activist students — including a successful protest movement to divest from apartheid. We have always had a transformative student body who care deeply about world affairs, and most crucially, they have cared in a practical and active way, engaging with impacted communities directly rather than solely in academic research. This is a wonderful brand ripe for the picking, yet it is instead left relegated to aging plaques on campus buildings.
If we want to cultivate a truly distinct identity, the proof of this free-thinking yet grounded tradition should be laid out before the eyes of observers rather than left to the quiet work of Watzek’s special collections team. The college can take many steps to put its history — and its many successes — back on the pedestal, thus changing the narrative around LC and making it far more enticing to prospective students.
For one, the front page of LC’s website should include profiles from its most successful alumni. No doubt alumni outreach is a difficult task, and obtaining profiles from our busy former students even more so. Yet for the benefit of the college’s future, it must be done. To aid in this, the college should offer invites to host lectures, special honors during commencement, awards for accomplishment — anything which will entice them to publicize their success in a way that is directly tied to the name of LC. I want to see a profile of Brown’s time at LC in our institution’s center of communications, not hidden in the depths of her Wikipedia entry.
Further, the college’s rich history should be highlighted in a timeline that is also promoted on the front page of our website, not left on a plaque on display in J.R. Howard. The merit of maintaining traditions — or bringing old ones back — also cannot be discounted. Both promoting LC’s history and maintaining its traditions provides students with an identity of unique heritage, building their sense of affiliation with LC students of the past. The college’s once-famous May Fete, a celebration that featured the crowning of a May Queen, live music, entertainment and the wrapping of a May pole, has been entirely lost to time despite being LC’s oldest tradition. It would be worthwhile for LC to look back at these events and see if they can be adapted to the temper of modern students; maybe instead of a May Queen, we would crown a May Monarch.
As HPU and Reed have shown, the best way forward for LC is to form a distinct public reputation. The harsh truth is, investing in new programs will not be enough. Any step toward making LC stand out as a unique institution in the realm of public relations will pay toward increasing enrollment far more than a new environmental center or data science major ever will. I have provided some simple steps the college can take to improve its profile and attract prospective students, but they are not absolute; I have passed the ball over, but ultimately, it is in the court of the administration.
About the Author
So many excellent points in this article. As an alumna of over 50 years I have watched the College reject the opinions of alumni, particularly recently as it desperately tries to rebrand itself, squander whatever relationship it had with alumni by focusing only on monetary contributions, and place minimal importance and resources in fostering any sense of community among alumni. It is no better illustrated than the recent revamping of the website where alumni have NO presence on the home page. One can only access alumni information by using the Search feature. It just speaks volumes.
There is in fact a strong community of alumni of the College, but it is personal connections, without assistance or involvement of the College except occasional reunions. Lewis and Clark alumni are accomplished, interesting, and have a global sense of the world, having benefitted from the international study program while undergraduates, resulting in a huge potential asset which is untapped and underappreciated. Such a lost opportunity.
Please report back on any responses you get from college administrators. Well done.