College At Every Level Success can be achieved at any school

Education: It Is What You Make It

Students don’t need to attend an elite university to gain a Grade A education.

BY SYDNEY DANIELS

EDITORIAL EDITOR

Students need to develop 50-year plans. Not four-year plans. A name-brand education may carry the weight of traditional excellence, but a state school education can be just as beneficial. With enough hard work and determination, I believe that students can attain anything.

To me, success isn’t measured by the selectivity of the college that someone chooses to make home for the next four years. But rather by their utilization of the opportunities offered.

Opportunities can be found on every campus, from alumni databases to internships to extra time with professors. These institutions don’t necessarily represent the “best” students, but often times, those with more opportunities or economic advantages. The location where someone hopes to end up is important when choosing a school.

Lastly, the responsibility falls on the student to extract as much as they can from their education, wherever it may be.

Highly selective universities don’t necessarily represent the best and brightest of the nation.

Sometimes they are simply generational legacies.

Sometimes they are students whose parents donate to the university. Other times they are simply geniuses who excel on standardized tests but can’t produce real world results. The admissions

“lottery” is flawed in some aspects and a number of qualified and brilliant students don’t apply, for fear

6LE JOURNAL APRIL of the shocking price tag.

Harvard graduates may have more notoriety, but University of Kansas graduates get hired in the Midwest. “The best,” in one region, isn’t the best for everybody. According to Dan Cranshaw partner at Polsinelli Law Firm, one must always consider where they want to live after college. Cranshaw went to Princeton University for his undergraduate degree and University of Kansas law school for graduate school.

He is content with his degree because it served him well when looking for employment in Kansas City, Missouri. KU’s locality and recognition in Kansas City is preferred to the cold, strangeness of foreign, deemed pretentious East Coast universities like Harvard. According to Cranshaw, it is all relative. If one wants to pursue a career in New England, then they should aim to attend a university in New England. If one wants to stay in Kansas City, then KU, Kansas State University and the University of Missouri are excellent options. It all depends on the long-term goals of the student.

Furthermore, students who attend schools with less pomp and prestige sometimes work harder than those who attend elite universities according to a New York Times article. Instead of focusing on the allure and glamour surrounding an institution, students are able to benefit more from their education by focusing solely on the knowledge gained in the classroom, not the reputation of the institution itself. According to college counselor Erin Stein, non-ivy level schools provide students with more access to their professors, research and more opportunities for leadership and growth.

So much of “success” is gained by a student’s own drive to enlighten themselves both

(Photo by Meghan Kearney)

intellectually and culturally. According to the New York Times article, in 2014 the alma maters of the CEOs of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies were the University of Arkansas, the University of Texas, the University of California-Davis, the University of Nebraska, Auburn,Texas A & M, the General Motors Institute (now Kettering University), the University of Kansas, the University of Missouri St. Louis and Dartmouth College. “There are two names on the college diploma,” Stein said. “The name of the institution and your name. I fully believe the most important name on that diploma is your name, the name you’ve made for yourself during your time at that institution: the ways you got involved, the connections you made, the opportunities you took advantage of, the impact or legacy you left behind.”

Ultimately, it’s up to every student to decide what is right for them. My path happens to be one that led me to a “name-brand” institution, but that doesn’t mean any of the pathways others took are lesser. Education is meant to be individualized and different environments cater to different students. American society is overly obsessed with the prestige that comes with a degree from a selective university. It’s not the degree that breeds success, but the person behind it. Whether that degree is obtained from the University of Missouri or Yale, it’s the student who will determine their fate. The name and connections garnered from an institution can only go so far. They may get someone the job, but then that person is charged with keeping it. When choosing a school, one should look longterm, because in the end, four years of education will be virtually nothing compared to the next 50 years of their life.