01.18.05
Paying for the name….
I found this article on slate about Who Needs Harvard?. Basically talks about how the percentage of Ivy League graduates are declining in US corporations. They attribute this to both the improvement of other schools and also the necessity of the rich to work.
My 2c is that the these days there is a extreme level of diversity among different fields. A small private university cannot offer a premier education for the great diversity in careers. On the other hand, larger public universities not only have the critical mass to offer specialized education in many diverse fields, but also can pool the resources necessary for each field.
A professor at school told me that university is derivied from the two roots: “uni” means everything, and “versity” meaning knowledge. What he was trying to tell me is that in a university, you have to learn a little bit of everything. I can see how this applies in a specialized sense. For example, learning computer science is ok, but if you have the opportunity to learn CS and business, or CS and something else, it gives you a better level of understanding how one topic of knowledge can relate to others.