Comparing Two Universities

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Beautiful mountains surround the private campus. Although there is diversity, the students are mostly white and their parents represent the upper echelon of society with the exception of a minority of students who were awarded scholarships and financial aid. At age eighteen a white male student enthusiastically reads aloud to his twenty classmates a passage from Metaphysics, by Aristotle. After graduating at age 22 he gains admittance to the Masters program at the Law School at University of Southern California. Upon graduating he pursues a successful career in entertainment law. He becomes financially secure, and spends the rest of his life tending to the needs of his wife and fostering the growth and development of his children.

During the same time span in a separate part of California a single Hispanic mother of two attends three night classes at the local community college. Beginning her education with remedial math and English, she finally completes enough units to attend California State University, Monterey Bay, (CSUMB). Her job working at Albertson’s and her two-year-old daughter are constantly taking time away from her education. After a challenging four years she graduates at age 32 with a B.A. in liberal studies, and becomes an English Learner Coordinator for the Los Angeles Unified School District. She works until she is eligible for retirement at age 67.

Every student comes from a different environment. These are two stereotypical examples of graduate students of two very different universities. The reason these students appear so different is because they are a direct output of their specific environment. If the Hispanic mother grew up in the same environment as the white male student and graduated from Thomas Aquinas College, or if the white male student grew up in a poor illiterate family would they have different lives? Every university has different focuses and goals, and the goals a university sets affect the students’ ideals and beliefs. These ideals and beliefs in due course shape and mold the future of society.

In John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University Newman relates is idea that the goal of a university should be that of training, “good members of society.”(48) Someone who can have a positive contribution to the future of humanity. Although this work was written in 1852 it is still among the most famous articles to attempt to define the aspects of a liberal arts education.

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