What is the appropriate goal for a student attending college: excellence and breadth of education, or graduation from a school with a good reputation? Most parents and university presidents opt for the latter, often depriving the student of a more meaningful and productive future.
The Illinois Board of Higher Education questions the value of allocating so many resources for a research faculty and its projects (“State productivity study upsets college professors,” Page 1, Dec. 26). That is necessary to build a university reputation sufficient to bring national and local investment to Illinois while attracting high-level manufacturing and a technically competent workforce.
Universities exist, however, to build and maintain a prestigious research faculty and quality graduate school, the two factors that create academic reputation–not to educate undergraduate students.
For excellence and breadth of undergraduate education, choose a college, especially one that has mind- and experience-broadening required courses.
There is a glut of narrowly educated undergraduates who can’t organize their thoughts sufficiently to communicate and can’t conceptualize from a diversity of data and experiences the options for action and pass reasoned judgment on them. For the student, college should be a rewarding opportunity to expand and flower intellectually in fertile surroundings. That opportunity is rarely available later in life.
