Each school has its advantage: William and Mary is small, UVA is famous, and Tech has football. Unfortunately, each school also has its disadvantage. William and Mary is public, UVA is public, and Tech is public. As much as the state-school status of these institutions makes them great through allowing people of any social status to attend top-quality colleges, a public school can only go so far in providing the sort of high-class education and environment that students from Thomas Jefferson in the North to Maggie Walker in Richmond to Frank Cox in the East so desperately seek. The solution to this bind? Go Private.
Never.
Believe it or not Virginia, but there are faculty and students (both in-state and out-of-state) at each of these three schools who wish to switch from public to private. Are these people particularly wealthy? Are they anti-state-government? No. What these proponents of private schools have in common is a desire for academic excellence. They argue that private colleges have greater freedom in admissions, administration, and funding. This is true, but I don't buy the argument that those three things would make any of our top schools any better. William and Mary, UVA, and Tech are great because they are public. Virginia is better off because we have these schools at our disposal.
This does not mean that we should be content with the current standing of these schools. UVA is ranked as the 2nd best public school in the nation and 23rd overall, William and Mary is ranked as the 6th best public and 33rd overall, and Tech is ranked as the 29th best public and 71st overall. Many applaud these rankings, but I find them disappointing. UVA should be considered an Ivy-equivalent like Duke, Stanford, and Chicago. Right now Berkeley is the only public school to hold that honor. UVA doesn't have to be better than Berkeley; it just has to be better than it is now. William and Mary is already an environment comparable to our nation's top liberal arts colleges, it just needs to embrace that and show the country that students don't need to endure the high costs and painful cold of Williams or Carleton to get that sort of an education. Virginia Tech is a real gem. With equally strong undergraduate and graduate programs in a vast variety of fields available to tens of thousands of students at a time, I see this school as one where career-minded students from across the East Coast will be drawn to jump-start a prosperous future at less than preposterous costs.
We must take action now to ensure that Virginia is known to all as the pinnacle of public higher education in the United States. We have the base. Five schools: William and Mary, UVA, Virginia Tech, JMU, and GMU. Now we need government action. We should tell our legislators to approve a comprehensive pre-K education package to improve our students' intellectual capacity from day one. We need to reform K-12 education. George Allen's Standards of Learning only went so far in testing the quality of education in Virginia. Too many students learn to the test and are trained as true thinkers. Finally, the state needs to concentrate funds into these five schools, give them more administrative freedom, and keep tuition costs low.
This is an important issue to Virginia. Ask your candidates for Delegate and Senate what their plan is to make the Commonwealth's public colleges the best in the nation.
Let me add another Virginia Institution to the list... a school that has produced Virginia Congressmen, Senators and Governors, a Federal Supreme Court Justice and a Federal Secretary of State as well as numerous Rhodes Scholars, fortune 100 corporate heads and a steady stream of citizen soldiers whose service to our Commonwealth and our Nation is well documented.
The school is Virginia Military Institute. US News and World Reports ranks VMI as:
?#1 Public Liberal Arts College
?#9 Civil Engineering Program among non doctoral schools
?#36 Engineering Programs among non doctoral schools
Agreed, VMI is a very small school that is not the right choice for everyone; however, it has been and is a major part of Virginia's long and storied history of academic excellence.
This new President changed the focus to boosting enrollment so we could have a better athletic program. Strike 1. To this end he threw out the high standards of enrollment that had kept Bridgewater a top notch school, and started letting unqualified people in. Strike 2. He then managed to eliminate the unique semester system that had, in my mind, made Bridgewater an attractive place to attend, and replaced it with a system just like every other school. Strike 3.
The point is that while you can find top notch private schools, all you need to do is have a bad President and you can flush that excellence down the drain. Public schools are insulated from that somewhat, but they do have to deal with the state government and meet certain demands that may or may not have anything to do with education.
It is a trade off. But I'll take Virginia Tech any day!
Matusleo
To be perfectly honest I thought VMI was private! Shows what I know/the image the school gives off. It's okay, a lot of people think WM is private and that's my school.