Sterling College's Response to the U.S. Department of Education's National Call to Action

American higher education is living through a crisis of public trust, and most of that crisis is self-inflicted. Families wonder whether a degree still means what it used to mean. Employers wonder whether graduates can think, write, and work. A great many people suspect, not unreasonably, that many colleges hold convictions they are unwilling to name out loud. On August 3, a, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon asked every college and university in the country to answer that suspicion directly, in public, by the end of the year.

Sterling College is glad to answer it. We believe faith-based colleges and especially Christ-centered institutions are unusually well positioned to lead this conversation, not despite our convictions but because of them. The real problem in American higher education has never been that institutions believe things. It is that too many believe things while insisting, with a straight face, that they do not. Sterling College does not have that problem. We exist to develop creative and thoughtful leaders who understand a maturing Christian faith, and we state it plainly on the things we publish. We believe God’s Word is Truth; that the bible is God’s infallible revelation to man — a conviction that frees us to engage any question without flinching. We believe in the authority of God’s Word; in missional purity and biblical fidelity.  What follows is not a defense. It is an account of what that mission looks like in practice, for the students we admit, the classrooms we run, the price we charge, and the graduates we send back into Kansas, the Great Plains and other areas around the world.

 

Who We Are, Plainly Stated

We admit students on readiness, character, and demonstrated potential to do rigorous liberal arts work — never on quota, and never on any factor unrelated to a student's capacity to learn and grow. We also ask, openly, that students be willing to engage with a Statement of Faith that has never been a secret, because a college that hides its identity is not being tolerant; it is simply being vague. Neither race nor ethnicity plays any role in our admissions or scholarship decisions, and that has been true at Sterling long before anyone asked us to say so in public.

That same honesty carries into the classroom. We do not pretend to be neutral about what we believe, and we think claimed neutrality is often just a more polite way of refusing to say where you stand. What we offer students instead is a real argument: a stated position, a serious encounter with the strongest case against it, and the tools to work out their own convictions rather than inherit ours by default. That is harder to teach than neutrality, but we think it produces sound graduates with biblical convictions of their own.

Pluralism is a word worth being careful with. There is a real difference between acknowledging that many views exist, which we do gladly; valuing diversity for its own sake, which we are glad to do inside a shared theological commitment; and insisting that every ideological or religious claim carries equal truth, which we do not believe and will not pretend to. Our faculty are hired, in part, for their fit with Sterling's mission and articulated statements of faith, but they are also expected to understand opposing arguments well enough to state them fairly and to help students reason through them rather than simply avoid them. That is the kind of rigor a real liberal arts education owes its students.

It is also why we protect open, even uncomfortable, disagreement on our campus, while holding a clear and published line against harassment, intimidation, or disruption that stops other people from learning or speaking. Every person on this campus carries the image of God, and that conviction, not a speech code, is our real protection against cruelty. Students should not have to guess where the line sits; ours is written down.

 

What a Sterling College Degree Is Worth

None of that matters much if a Sterling education is not affordable to the families who most need what a small college can offer. We serve many first-generation and working-class students, and we do not treat cost as a footnote. Being small is itself a form of accountability — we do not have the administrative bulk to hide waste even if we wanted to, and we intend to keep it that way.

We also think about our students a little differently than the word “student” usually implies. Internally, we refer to the people we serve as “future graduates” rather than students, a small shift in language but a real shift in posture. Enrollment is only the beginning of the work, and our job is to walk each person to completion and send them out prepared for whatever comes next.

Rigor means little if the work we are grading is not the student's own. As AI tools make it easier to produce something that looks finished without being understood, we are leaning harder on the kinds of assessment a machine cannot fake — oral defense, hands-on practicum work, and faculty who know a student's writing well enough to notice when something is off.

We are also adopting a tiered AI-use scale for coursework, modeled on frameworks that several peer Christian institutions have already put in place: AI use is restricted by default, and instructors who want to permit it for a given assignment must say so explicitly and set the terms themselves. We take this seriously because we take our students seriously, as people made in God's image, not processors to be optimized. No tool built by human hands should be allowed to stand in for the forming of a human mind.

 

Our Place in Kansas and the Nation

Sterling is not a research university, and we carry no portfolio of federally funded or foreign-backed research to protect or explain away, which makes that part of this conversation short for us, if not for everyone.

What we do have is a long record of sending graduates into classrooms, clinics, congregations, farms, and businesses across this nation, and many of them are the first in their family to finish a degree. That is the return we would ask to be measured by, even when it does not show up in a first-year salary survey.

Sterling does not apologize for believing that the Judeo-Christian convictions foundational to our American values are worth teaching and worth defending. Our students are not taught to see their country or their faith as burdens to overcome.

We measure our worth in the teachers, pastors, farmers, medical professionals, small-business owners and corporate leaders we send into this nation than in a ranking.

 

What We Are Asking for in Return

We are glad to be held to all of this, and in return we would ask Washington for two things. First, continued and serious protection for the religious mission of faith-based colleges, in regulation, in accreditation, and in civil rights enforcement, because that protection is what makes genuine diversity of thought in American higher education possible rather than theoretical. Second, regulatory rules sized for institutions our size, since colleges without research-university budgets cannot absorb research-university compliance costs no matter how good the underlying goal is.

We would also offer the Secretary a respectful observation: many faith-based colleges have spent decades resisting the very drift this Call-to-Action names. We do not say that to claim credit. We say it because the public's trust in higher education will not be restored by policy alone; it will be restored by institutions willing to say, plainly, what they believe, and then live up to it.

Sterling's mission is to develop creative and thoughtful leaders who understand a maturing Christian faith, and every word there is doing work. “Creative” means we expect genuine original thought from our students, not recitation. “Thoughtful” means we expect rigor and real engagement with hard questions, not slogans. “Leaders” means we expect our graduates to go and serve somewhere — a classroom, a clinic, a congregation, or a small business — not simply to collect a credential. “Maturing Christian faith” means we expect growth, not arrival, and humility, not certainty for its own sake.

Sterling College did not need a federal call to action to explore and define why it exists, but we are glad to state it publicly.

 

Submitted on behalf of the Sterling College Board of Trustees by:

 

President, Scott A. Rich
Sterling College, Sterling, Kansas