Sophomore Success:
Preparing Leaders for the Third Millennium
Quality Enhancement Plan
Ave Maria University
The future of the world and the Church belongs to the younger generation,
to those who, born in this century, will reach maturity in the next, the first
century of the new millennium.
-Pope Saint John Paul II, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, §58
Submitted to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools
Commission on Colleges
January 2015
Quality Enhancement Plan—Ave Maria University
I.
Executive Summary
The “Sophomore Success: Preparing Leaders for the Third Millennium" program focuses
primarily on the growth and development of sophomores during a critical year of personal
formation and decision-making related to education and professional life. Through the proposed
SYE program, Ave Maria University will apply its efforts in two chief areas: first, enhanced
student integration with the liberal arts tradition, and second, proactive career development
facilitated by growth in self-knowledge. Each aspect of the “Sophomore Success” QEP is critical
for the formation of leaders for the 21st century; furthermore, each goal integrates clearly into
Ave Maria’s curriculum and mission. Finally, the goals and outcomes of the QEP strongly
embody the guiding document of the Catholic Church on Catholic universities, which states that
“the education of students is to combine academic and professional development with formation
in moral and religious principles and the social teachings of the Church” (John Paul II, Ex Corde
Ecclesiae, Article 4, Section 5).
By design, Ave Maria’s QEP is grounded in the newly formed sophomore year initiative. The
sophomore year is more and more widely acknowledged to constitute a gap in the educational
experience of today’s college students. As sophomores have moved beyond the
apprehensiveness of a first year experience yet have not entered into the forward-looking
intensity of their junior and senior years, the sophomore year is a natural liminal moment, one of
significant decisions—about majors, career goals, and even persistence in college. It follows
that the sophomore year is also a time of personal introspection, when students begin to take
stock of their own strengths and weaknesses and attempt to see where they might fit into the
professional world. Accordingly, for Ave Maria University the sophomore year is a time ripe with
opportunity to help students more confidently embrace their education and begin to make the
transition from student to young professionals prepared to be leaders in a wide range of fields,
vocations, and industries. To achieve this, the various actions which the University has selected
for the “Sophomore Success” QEP are designed to build upon each other in order to create a
framework within which students’ sophomore year experience can be a fruitful period, one which
will provide a more solid, more conscious foundation for student learning not only in the
sophomore year but also in the junior and senior years and, it is hoped, beyond.
The specific goals and student learning outcomes which the University has selected as the
means of initiating the vision of the QEP are as follows:
Goal 1: The Pursuit of Knowledge and Its Effective Communication
Outcome 1. Liberal Arts Education: Students will articulate the nature and benefits of
a liberal arts education within the Catholic intellectual tradition.
Outcome 2. Oral Communication: Students will express knowledge of rhetoric and
characteristics of great speeches, and they will demonstrate skills in oral presentation.
Goal 2: The Development of Self-Knowledge and Professional Preparation
Outcome 3. Self-Evaluation: Students will identify and describe their main talents and
potential personal strengths.
Outcome 4. Career Orientation: Students will evaluate academic and career goals in
light of their talents and strengths and apply strength-related strategies in consideration
of calling and career planning.
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Quality Enhancement Plan—Ave Maria University
The Pursuit of Knowledge and Its Effective Communication.
“Born from the heart of the Church, a Catholic University is . . . dedicated to research, to
teaching and to the education of students who freely associate with their teachers in a
common love of knowledge. With every other University it shares . . . that joy of
searching for, discovering and communicating truth in every field of knowledge.”
(John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, n. 1)
Liberal Education: In keeping with Catholic intellectual tradition out of which Ave Maria arises
and on which it continues to stand, the University takes a distinctively philosophical approach to
the study of the liberal arts. Indeed, one of the great challenges posed by the QEP is the
integration of Ave Maria University’s intensely philosophical mission with a practical framework
which promises strong results for student learning. In order to meet that challenge, “Sophomore
Success” takes as its first learning Outcome the desire to instill in students an understanding of
the value of a liberal arts education. According to Newman, “[a] habit of mind is formed which
lasts through life . . . [this] is the main purpose of a University in its treatment of its students”
(Newman, Idea of a University, pp. 76-77). The University will begin the process for forming that
habit of mind with the creation of a sophomore orientation constructed specifically to initiate
students, guided by and in association with professors, into a discussion of the value of their
education. To begin forming a hopefully lifelong habit of searching and discovering, the nature
of the liberal arts education and its value will be picked up in the required sophomore year
philosophy course through additional readings and a targeted essay, intended to lead students
to understand and, more importantly, to be able to articulate the unique benefits, both for the
individual student and for society, of a liberal arts education within the Catholic intellectual
tradition.
Oral Communication: The emphasis given to the effective communication of knowledge,
Outcome 2 of the “Sophomore Success” QEP, naturally picks up the emphasis in Outcome 1
upon students’ ability to articulate the benefits of the liberal arts and begins to orient that
knowledge towards the world. Newman points out in his Idea of a University that “thought and
speech are inseparable from each other,” and Augustine notes “that the eloquent should speak
in such a way as to instruct, delight, and move their listeners” (Augustine, On Christian
Teaching, Book IV, 74). Both Newman and Augustine are fitting sources of wisdom today, for
leaders heading into the 21st century, far more than in recent decades, are expected to inspire
as much by the spoken word as by action. Ave Maria University, in its dedication both to the
formation of an intellectual and moral foundation within its students and also to their
professional and vocational preparation, recognizes that preparing students to succeed in their
vocational and professional lives requires more than conceptual knowledge. Thus, Outcome 2 is
dually-oriented, looking at once to continue helping students understand the nature of their
education and, by extension, themselves, while at the same time preparing students to
articulately and eloquently carry that understanding to the world, both in a personal and a
professional capacity. In order to achieve this outcome, Ave Maria already requires oral
presentations within students’ upper-level major coursework; “Sophomore Success” will begin
preparing students for the oral presentations by integrating into the required sophomore year
Politics course a study of great American political speeches. The speeches will be engaged at
both the conceptual and rhetorical levels, and the semester will culminate in each student
making an oral presentation based on the speeches studied.
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Quality Enhancement Plan—Ave Maria University
The Development of Self-Knowledge and Professional Preparation.
“Students are challenged to pursue an education that combines excellence in humanistic
and cultural development with specialized professional training. Most especially, they are
challenged to continue the search for truth and for meaning throughout their lives. . . .
They should realize the responsibility of their professional life, the enthusiasm of being
the trained 'leaders' of tomorrow, of being witnesses to Christ in whatever place they
may exercise their profession.” (John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, n. 23)
Self-Evaluation: The fuller engagement with the nature of the liberal arts education which is
emphasized in Outcome 1 is not limited in its affects to the realm of the conceptual but includes
as well the realm of the personal. As John Paul II wrote in Fides et ratio, “[the] more human
beings know reality and the world, the more they know themselves in their uniqueness, with the
question of the meaning of things and of their very existence becoming ever more pressing . . .
The admonition Know yourself was carved on the temple portal at Delphi, as testimony to a
basic truth . . . of . . . ‘human beings’ . . . as those who ‘know themselves’” (John Paul II, Fides
et ratio, n. 1). Outcome 3 picks up the call to pursue self-knowledge, one first answered by the
QEP in the broad searching and discovering initiated in Outcome 1, and aims to provide
students with the tools necessary to begin identifying personal strengths and weaknesses.
Students will, starting at the sophomore orientation, make use of the Clifton StrengthsFinder
questionnaire (Clifton, Anderson, & Schreiner, 2006) in order to start the process of identifying
potential strengths and weaknesses. Following completion of the questionnaire, students will
work with faculty mentors who will guide students in the process of reflection on the
StrengthsFinder questionnaire and in the selection of a major. The faculty members selected to
act as mentors will be trained in a newly implemented program designed specifically to prepare
them to effectively use the StrengthsFinder questionnaire in order to guide students through the
important decisions which the sophomore year presents.
Career Orientation: The final Outcome of the “Sophomore Success” QEP aims to build on the
knowledge gained in the discussions of the nature and benefits of a liberal arts education, in the
completion of the StrengthsFinder questionnaire, and in the meetings and discussions with
faculty mentors. As Newman indicates, “[when] the Church founds a University, she is not
cherishing talent, genius, or knowledge, for their own sake, but for the sake of her children, with
a view to their spiritual welfare and their religious influence and usefulness, with the object of
training them to fill their respective posts in life better, and of making them more intelligent,
capable, active members of society” (Newman, Idea of a University, p. xxxix). The call to learn
and to communicate, both in regards to a knowledge of the world and a knowledge of the self,
must, as Newman claims, be directed not in, towards the self, but out, into the world. Beginning
with the work the student does with the faculty mentor, and culminating in the creation of a
resume which will be submitted for assessment to Ave Maria’s Career Services, Outcome 4
explicitly orients the knowledge gained by the student through the activities of the “Sophomore
Success” QEP towards the world.
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