Well, Joel,” the Princeton recruiter tells the nervous young high school senior from Chicago`s North Shore, ”your stats are very respectable. You`ve done some solid work here.
”But,” he says, condescendingly, ”it`s not quite Ivy League now, is it?”
Young Joel, who has been running a brothel at home while his parents are out of town, is discouraged-but only for a moment. He quickly dons a pair of sunglasses, lights a cigarette, breaks into a grin and declares:
”Looks like University of Illinois!”
They cheered that line from the movie ”Risky Business” in theaters in the Chicago area, but they weren`t amused in Urbana-Champaign, 130 boring miles down Int. 57 in corn and soybean country. Hollywood does an entire movie, ”The Big Chill,” about sensitive, intelligent graduates of their academic archrival, the University of Michigan, but it portrays the University of Illinois-home of the Supercomputer, the National Center for Superconductivity Research and a superlibrary bigger than Michigan`s or Princeton`s-as the second choice of a rich suburban pimp.
”He`s saying, `I know I`ll get into the U. of I. because it`s a catchall,` ” complains Steve Vavrik of Naperville, a mechanical-engineer ing student with no doubts about the value of his taxpayer-supported education.
”I know that really bothered my parents. Who`s this guy to say we`re second-rate?
”But,” he muses, ”there`s that stigma about being a public school.”
The stigma is worse in the East, of course, but it also exists in privileged parts of the Midwest. At exclusive prep schools in Chicago and at public schools in the more affluent suburbs, it`s just not very chic to become one of 36,000 students on the sprawling, architecturally undistinguished Urbana campus, where the early-morning stillness is punctured by the chants of ROTC cadets on drill and the mooing of cattle awaiting their daily milking at the College of Agriculture. How cool can it be to go to a university that built a library underground to avoid casting a shadow on an experimental farm plot?
No, the socially proper thing to do is to matriculate at a small overpriced Eastern college with a picturebook campus and a Benetton on the quaint main street of town. Students line up to get into these schools, despite astonishing price increases that have pushed some of them over the $20,000-a-year mark, when you include all costs. It just goes to prove what educators call the ”Chivas Regal theory” of higher education: The higher the price, the more attractive the college is to those who equate cost with quality and exclusivity.
But here`s a little secret that the designer colleges don`t advertise:
Many of them are happy to take the U. of I.`s rejects. That big university in the middle of nowhere, far from being a catchall college of last resort, has become one of the most academically elite public universities in the nation and, at a total cost of $8,000 to $8,500 a year, one of the biggest bargains in higher education-provided the student is resourceful and highly motivated and doesn`t require a lot of personal attention. It is not the place for sensitive souls who hope to ”find” themselves in college, experiment with alternative lifestyles, write a little poetry and discuss Mallarme with a professor while helping him weed his garden.
Each year the U. of I.-and throughout this article we`re talking about the Urbana-Champaign campus, not the less prestigious but steadily improving Chicago campus-is the choice of about one-quarter of the Chicago area`s valedictorians. One-third of the members of the first graduating class of the high-powered Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy are freshmen at Urbana- Champaign this fall.
The average U. of I. freshman scored 27 out of a possible 36 on the American College Test (ACT) and was in the top 7 percent of his or her high school graduating class-and the numbers are even more impressive in the schools of engineering and business, the two hottest majors.
Within the Big 10, only Northwestern and Michigan attract freshmen as able as those at the U. of I. The average freshman at the other Big 10 schools scored 23 or 24 on the ACT and was in the top 20 percent of the class in high school. Those schools, especially nearby Iowa, Wisconsin and Indiana, are full of bright kids who couldn`t get into the U. of I.
Illinois rejects only about 5,500 of its 15,000 applicants each year because its admissions guidelines are spelled out so clearly that students don`t bother applying if they`re not up to snuff. If your ACT score was only 20, which is about the average for Northern Illinois and Illinois State Universities, you`d better be in the top 1 percent of your high school class if you want in at the U. of I. If 20 percent of your high school classmates had better grades than yours, you`d better have scored at least 30 on the ACT. None of that applies to professional-quality athletes, of course, and underperforming students can talk their way in by writing a persuasive essay. The U. of I.`s academic excellence is well-documented. Edward B. Fiske`s
”Selective Guide to Colleges,” for example, calls it ”a giant among academic institutions, ranking among the world`s great universities” and one of only eight public schools that get five stars from Fiske for academics. The others are the universities of Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia, Wisconsin and California (at both Berkeley and Los Angeles) and the College of William and Mary in Virginia.
In a survey of college presidents, admissions officers and academic deans in U.S. News and World Report last year, the U. of I. was ranked 22d among major national universities and seventh among public universities, behind Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin, UCLA, North Carolina and Virginia. When the magazine ranked universities by more objective criteria-budgets, faculty salaries, endowment, applicants` test scores, percentage of applicants denied admission, etc.-Illinois dropped out of the top 25, as did Wisconsin, an indication, perhaps, that the university keeps its reputation high without spending quite as much as other schools.
The U. of I.`s engineering school consistently ranks among the top three in the nation. A U.S. News and World Report survey of engineering school deans in 1987 ranked it second only to MIT. (Princeton`s was 14th.) The undergraduate accountancy program was named the best in the country by a publication called Public Accounting Report.
In 1982 several academic groups joined together to rate university graduate programs according to faculty quality. The U. of I. ranked among the nation`s top five public institutions in chemistry, computer science, mathematics, physics, classics, French, music, microbiology, physiology, psychology and civil and electrical engineering.
While Chicago`s civic boosters talk about building a ”world-class”
library, the U. of I. has had one for decades. With 7.3 million volumes scattered throughout 38 campus buildings, it`s the third largest academic library in the nation (behind Harvard`s and Yale`s) and the largest in a public university. Its Milton collection, a paradise for students of the 17th Century English poet and essayist, is the largest in the world.
The library owns 350,000 maps and subscribes to more than 25,000 academic journals and more than 500 daily newspapers. Each week it ships 2,500 items to public, academic and corporate libraries around the state.
The newest showpiece on campus is the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, a $50 million, five-story, 313,000-square-foot think tank dubbed ”The Palace” by envious humanities professors. Financed mainly by a $40 million gift from engineering-school alumnus Arnold O. Beckman, the institute provides faculty from more than a dozen different departments with a place to collaborate on research projects that cross the boundaries of academic disciplines.
The research at Beckman is broadly directed toward learning more about human and artificial intelligence. The projects include measuring the body`s electrical signals as they pass through nerve cells and building robots that learn through experience. William Greenough, a psychology professor and associate director of the institute, is studying the physical changes that take place in the brain when something is learned. He puts one set of rats through what he calls ”a Head Start program” by letting them live in a large bin full of brightly colored ramps, toys and assorted junk. Another set of rats lives in a standard boring cage. Greenough then slices up their brains and observes them under an electron microscope. He has found that the ”Head Start” rats have 25 percent more synapses-the areas of functional contact between nerve cells-than the unstimulated rats. The stimulation has actually led to observable physical change in the brain.
”When I started this research in 1972, the idea that new synapses could form in an undamaged adult nervous system was heresy,” says Greenough. ”Now it`s accepted.” But what causes that to happen? What kind of chemistry is going on in your head when a thought or experience makes a physical alteration in your brain? How does the brain store memories? Why does it store some memories and not others? Those are the kinds of questions they`re trying to answer at the Beckman Institute.
Research like that goes on all over the university. Even at the agriculture school, you see a lot more lab coats than bib overalls. In addition to breeding sweet corn that holds its sweetness longer, the university`s agricultural scientists are helping NASA develop plants that can grow in space. They`re also building machines that electronically gauge the pigmentation of flowers and vegetables so scientists can study the spread of disease and the growth of cells.
The U. of I. is the home of the only person to win the Nobel Prize twice in the same field. John Bardeen, a professor of physics and electrical engineering, won the physics prize in 1956 for helping develop the transistor and in 1972 for his work on superconductivity.
”We would not have been able to compete nationally and win the National Center for Supercomputing Applications or to create the Center for
Supercomputing Research and Development if we didn`t have the very best talent that was available nationally,” says Stanley O. Ikenberry, who just completed his 10th year as president, making him the ranking president in the Big 10.
”If Minnesota or Berkeley or someplace else had that talent, they would have won the competition. The same is true, in a sense, of the Beckman Institute. Every major university in the country, from Johns Hopkins to Stanford to MIT to Caltech had a proposal in to Beckman.”
The university has attracted talented people not so much by throwing money at them as by creating an environment that makes it easy for them to pursue their research projects. It excels at providing ”support” or
”infrastructure” for its faculty. If a chemistry professor needs an unusual type of beaker or glass tubing for an experiment, he need only drop down to the glass-blowing shop on the 1st floor of the chemistry building and describe what he needs. If a history professor needs an obscure journal for a learned article, he can access the library from his home computer and have the journal delivered.
”The resources here are unbelievable, and people are willing to share them,” says Anne Huff, a professor of business administration. ”I can always find someone who knows a technique or a statistical package that I need for my own research. It`s so important to a researcher to be at a place where you can do what you want to do, rather than what you`re constrained to do.”
Many professors believe academic rivalry and faculty politics are less heated here than elsewhere. ”This is a very friendly place,” says Benita Katzenellenbogan, a reproductive biologist who came to the U. of I. from Harvard in 1971 and has become one of the biggest names in her field. ”The atmosphere is less intense than in the East, but the quality of research is just as good.”
Faculty salaries are good but not great compared with similar universities. According the American Association of University Professors, average compensation (salary plus major fringes) for a full professor at the U. of I. is $63,000, compared with $76,200 at the University of Michigan and $83,500 at the University of Chicago.
The U. of I. will narrow that gap this year with generous 8-percent pay increases, thanks to the recent state income-tax increase. But the salary averages obscure a wide disparity in pay between specialties that are hot and those that are not. Professors of business, engineering and the hard sciences can make as much as $110,000 to $115,000 at the U. of I., with opportunities for lucrative consulting work on the side. At the other end of the scale, a beginning instructor with a Ph.D. in English might make only $25,000. Or, to put it another way, the top salary for a professor of art, roughly $50,000, is about the same as the beginning salary for a professor of accounting.
Business, science and engineering attract the top salaries, top students and biggest research grants at the U. of I., leaving the university open to criticism for tilting too strongly toward science and technology. Ikenberry makes no apologies. ”We are and have been for over 100 years basically a very heavily science-and-technology -oriented university,” he says. ”We don`t want to walk away from that heritage. It makes us, in a way, constructively different from a lot of universities around the country.”
Illinois is different because it`s the state`s flagship academic university and land-grant university all rolled into one. The nation`s 69 land-grant universities were created after Congress passed the Morrill Act in 1862, granting each state a large amount of federal land (480,000 acres in Illinois` case), which was then sold to pay for new schools of ”agriculture and the mechanic arts.”
Many states, such as Michigan, Indiana and Iowa, set up land-grant universities (Michigan State, Purdue and Iowa State) separate from the academic university. To this day, students at the older universities in those states consider themselves an intellectual elite, dismissing the land-grant students as semiliterate farmers and dirty-fingernail technicians.
But Illinois had no major state university in 1862, only a state teachers college in Bloomington-Normal. It wanted the money, as did several private colleges. The legislature diddled until 1867, just before the deadline for using the land-grant money or losing it, when it finally decided to set up the Illinois Industrial University in Urbana-Champaign and give it all the money. The university struggled for its first 30 years-a name change in 1885 didn`t seem to help-and began to come alive only in the last decade of the 19th Century, when the legendary Gov. John Peter Altgeld poured money into the state`s higher-education system. During the next two decades the university embarked on a building boom-many of its Georgian-style buildings were constructed then-and built up its science and engineering departments.
The combination of land-grant practicality and ivory-tower academics
”has been a great advantage to the university,” says Ikenberry. ”Having the basic and applied sciences side by side has given us a greater critical mass than Michigan State or Indiana. We have, for example, a very strong physics department operating alongside the college of engineering, and very strong programs in biology and chemistry working right along with
agriculture.”
The selective-admissions policy took hold much more recently, after the state`s higher-education planners decided that the U. of I. should not try to accommodate all the postwar Baby Boomers who began storming the gates of higher education in the mid-`60s. Ohio State, for example, expanded from 20,000 students in 1960 to 53,000 in 1975 in an effort to maintain its open-admissions policy. But in Illinois, the state`s other public universities pressured the state Board of Higher Education to keep the U. of I. within bounds. As a result, the U. of I. grew from 23,000 in 1960 to just 35,000 by 1975, raising admissions requirements to keep out students it might have accepted a few years earlier.
Almost all those students are from Illinois. Despite its stellar reputation, the U. of I. enrolls fewer out-of-state students than any other Big 10 university; only 5 percent of its undergraduates come from out of state, compared with more than 30 percent at Michigan and Purdue. At times it seems as if every student you meet is from Chicago or its suburbs.
”Everybody expects you`re from the Chicago area, and if you`re not, they look at you kind of funny,” says Lois Casaleggi, a junior majoring in psychology. ”When I say I`m from Mt. Carmel (a town in southern Illinois), they all assume I mean Mt. Carmel High School, which is a Catholic boys school in Chicago.”
U. of I. administrators blame the situation on the boring location and Midwestern parochialism. They`d love to build up the university`s national reputation the way Michigan has, by wooing out-of-state students, but they don`t believe the legislature would let them get away with it.
”We don`t believe the (lack of) diversity in our student body is educationally sound,” says Chancellor Morton Weir, the chief executive officer of the Urbana-Champaign campus. ”We`re too monotonous, in a sense. Not only do 95 percent of our undergraduates come from Illinois, about 70 percent of those come from Chicago and the collar counties. Maybe two-thirds of our student body come from homes within 50 miles of each other. That`s not good.
”If possible you`d like the people next door or down the hall from you to be from another state or nation. Much of what people learn in college is learned out of class, not in it. If those experiences are all with people who are basically clones of yourself, it isn`t good.”
