University education, the best universities in the world, quotes, news, links, information and data by English-culture.com blog and Carl William Brown.
A University should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.
Benjamin Disraeli
What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
Thomas Carlyle
Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.
Benjamin Franklin
It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
Lord Henry P. Brougham
In university they don’t tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
Doris Lessing
I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike – and I don’t think there really is a distinction between the two – are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.
Harold Bloom
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
Benjamin Franklin
It doesn’t matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.
Confucius
Learning is like rowing upstream, not to advance is to drop back.
Chinese Proverb
The University brings out all abilities, including incapability.
Anton Chekhov
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in the students.
John Ciardi
I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn’t wait to be out of education.
Tom Stoppard
The original Latin word “universitas” refers in general to “a number of persons associated into one body, a society, company, community, guild, corporation, etc.” At the time of the emergence of urban town life and medieval guilds, specialised “associations of students and teachers with collective legal rights usually guaranteed by charters issued by princes, prelates, or the towns in which they were located” came to be denominated by this general term.
Like other guilds, they were self-regulating and determined the qualifications of their members. In modern usage the word has come to mean “An institution of higher education offering tuition in mainly non-vocational subjects and typically having the power to confer degrees,” with the earlier emphasis on its corporate organization considered as applying historically to Medieval universities.
The original Latin word referred to degree-granting institutions of learning in Western and Central Europe, where this form of legal organisation was prevalent, and from where the institution spread around the world. For non-related educational institutions of antiquity which did not stand in the tradition of the university and to which the term is only loosely and retrospectively applied, see ancient higher-learning institutions.
In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year. A bachelor’s degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense of sending their kids to college when they’re born. Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there?
More recently, from a report based on the book Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, for a large proportion of students, the answer to that question is a definitive no. Higher education faces crises on a number of fronts, but Arum and Roksa’s report that colleges are failing at their most basic mission will demand the attention of us all.
The book cites data from student surveys and transcript analysis to show that many college students have minimal classwork expectations – and then it tracks the academic gains (or stagnation) of 2,300 students of traditional college age enrolled at a range of four-year colleges and universities. The students took the Collegiate Learning Assessment (which is designed to measure gains in critical thinking, analytic reasoning and other “higher level” skills taught at college) at various points before and during their college educations, and the results are not encouraging.
The research found that after two years of college, 45% of students learned little to nothing. After four years, 36% of students learned almost nothing. The research then goes on to find a direct relationship between rigor and gains in learning and the most significant aspect to point out is that students who study by themselves for more hours each week gain more knowledge – while those who spend more time studying in peer groups see diminishing gains, and this supports the foundamental aspect of autonomus learning in education. (www.insidehighered.com/news)
Carl William Brown
Even though academic degrees have no value to society they enable employers to pay higher wages to smarter workers, but lower wages to everyone else, and in order to enjoy these higher wages, smart people must waste time and money going to the trouble of acquiring a degree. Perhaps everyone might be better off if the whole business were to be changed!
Carl William Brown
Priests are not men of the world; it is not intended that they should be; and a University training is the one best adapted to prevent their becoming so.
Samuel Butler
The Left is doing to America what it has done to almost everything it has deeply influenced – the arts, the university, religion, culture, minorities, Europe: ruining it.
Dennis Prager
A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
George Bernard Shaw
I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
One learns more from listening than speaking. And both the wind and the people who continue to live close to nature still have much to tell us which we cannot hear within university walls.
Thor Heyerdahl
I learnt more about politics during one South Dakota dust storm than in seven years at the university.
Hubert H. Humphrey
It makes little difference how many university courses or degrees a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another, his education is incomplete.
Norman Cousins
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Albert Camus
A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.
Theodore Roosevelt
www.economist.com/too-many-degrees-are-waste-money
Oxford has been named the world’s best university for the fifth consecutive year. But the latest rankings show that it’s China’s universities that are the rising stars of global higher education.
Tsinghua University enters the coveted top 20 of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings this year, a distinction previously only bestowed on European and US institutions.
Among the best Universities we can find:
Colleges for international students
MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology
California Institute of Technology
CMU Carnegie Mellon University
