Gintare's Post: worth reading!

Gintare said...

University Trick

Dear all,

Last year should have been my last year in high school. Hence, I had already started looking for a university. As I was browsing the web pages, particularly the about and why choose this school sections, of universities and colleges in the United States, I noticed two things:

~ Though each claimed to be exclusive, they were all the same.

~ It was impossible to grasp what the school was like because the concepts they used were very broad and had been used so much before that they did not mean anything now.

To illustrate these points I have chosen 10 colleges in the US: Amherst, Carleton, Beloit, Grinnell, Lafayette, Macalester, Marquette, St. Lawrence University, Wartburg and Williams.

Referring to my first argument, all the colleges mentioned above use the same vocabulary to describe themselves. For instance, Carleton College claims it is “independent and highly selective”, Wartburg College “is a nationally recognized, highly selective“, whereas Grinnell introduces itself as “a highly selective educational institution.”

As for students, they claim to have only “talented” and “diverse” students --

Amherst: “enrolling some 1,600 talented, energetic and diverse young men and women“
Carleton: “liberal arts college with a diverse and talented, exceptionally able student body“
Beloit: “educating particularly talented students”; “learning from their diverse peers”
Grinnell: “by promoting the diversity and talents of young men and women”
St. Lawrence University: “an open education to some of the most talented young people in the country”
Williams: “with a spectacularly talented and devoted faculty“

The problem is not being talented or diverse. It is, however, difficult to distinguish between talented and not talentless people. All of us are capable of doing something, thus we are all talented and there is no need to boast about it. Same for being diverse. It has been proven even biologically that one cannot find two absolutely identical human beings in the world, which makes all of us diverse. And, finally, if all colleges have exceptional students, it makes all of them homogeneous for a high-school senior who is trying to find a place to spend the upcoming four years at.

As for my second statement, in every description of these colleges I found at least one sentence which was verbose, sounded nice, and made the school look intellectual and enticing. Let us look at the two most interesting ones:

“Amherst is characterized by spirited interchange among students and acclaimed faculty skilled at asking challenging questions. “

The latter seems to be simply stuffed it with the typical vocabulary used by the academia to give the impression of sophistication. It is achieved by something that George Orwell calls pretentious diction: once one reads or hears the sentence, one does not emphasize the meaning, but is charmed by words such as spirited, interchanged, acclaimed, skilled and challenging. What the sentence is basically saying is that in Amherst students and recognized teachers have passionate discussions and ask each other questions.

“At Williams, with a spectacularly talented and devoted faculty and staff, great physical and financial wealth, and the absolute finest students in all of American higher education, we are obligated to realize a vision of educational excellence worthy of our extraordinary resources.“

I am absolutely fascinated by the adjectives used in the sentence above. If we cut out spectacularly, great, absolute and extraordinary, it would not change the meaning of the statement given that no explanation is provided about what talents the faculty and staff have how much money the college has and why their resources are extraordinary. For one thing, all these adjectives are relative, which, in a curious way, misleads the reader.

To conclude, these only very few tips I have brought upon in this field, and now I realise it would not be difficult to write an EE about this topic. The reason why the language of such statements is important is that university choice is one of the most important decisions in one‘s life, and many people cannot go and find out whether the school is really what it appears on paper. It should be made clear when things are being advertised and when objective information is provided.

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Sources:
http://www.carleton.edu/
http://www.amherst.edu/about_amh/profile.html
http://www.beloit.edu/about/
http://www.grinnell.edu/offices/president/missionstatement/
http://www.lafayette.edu/promos/glance/
http://www.macalester.edu/about.html
http://www.marquette.edu/about/
http://www.stlawu.edu/glance.html
http://www.wartburg.edu/about/
http://www.williams.edu/home/about_mission.php