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Brigham Young University - Provo

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Date: Nov 17 2004
Major: Psychology (This Major's Salary over time)
BYU is very good at what it aspires to be—an advanced seminary. No where in the world will bright, young LDS people get better training for church leadership than BYU. At BYU you get an education as good as you would get at an average state university, but you also get some spiritual experiences to uplift you for the rest of your life.

What I didn't like about BYU is that it didn't provide the mind-opening, intellectually challenging experience that I thought it would. I had the impression that a selective university invariably gives you a top-notch education, but of course I was wrong. After four years I had to conclude that in the academic realm, BYU was just like hundreds of other universities in the country which dump information on students without making too much effort to get students to think.

The sad fact is that I think BYU went through an identity crisis a few years ago, and it resolved the crisis in a way that eroded the intellectual caliber of the school. Some wanted BYU to become a prestigious research university; others wanted it to be a spiritual steroid that would strengthen the finest youth in the church at a critical time in their lives. Now that the conflict is simmering down, it is clear that the latter group won. Look at BYU's rankings in U.S. News—it's a third-tier school. (There are no rankings for campus spiritual climate.)

Some of the faculty at BYU are really great, but that's true of any school—some of the faculty are great. BYU has had and will probably always have difficulty attracting top-notch faculty. (It's odd that even many of the religion professors are really, really poor.)

Yet BYU attracts very bright students. I wasn't impressed with most of those I knew, but there's no question they were bright. In spite of their high GPA's and ACT scores, most students had little intellectual curiosity and were very resistant to entertaining new ideas. The main problem is not that the student body is 99% LDS or 95% Republican; the main problem is that many BYU students don't even want to acknowledge other points of view or to try to understand why others would disagree with their opinions. Isn't it an important goal of education to understand that the issues out there are complex, and that there's more than one way to see them, and that points of view with which you disagree might be just as reasonable as your own points of view? At BYU, the thinking around campus is so homogeneous that the graduates get set up for culture shock. Unlike BYU, the real world is diverse.

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responseHey.

That was a really great comment. I myself am an Engineering students studying First Year in the Unviersity of British Columbia in Canada. Am basically from India and am a Hindu. I did not like the school and hence applied for transfer to 4 very good schools and one average school which is BYU. Got accepted in 3 including BYU. Althouhg any wise person would go to U.of Penn, something attracts me to BYU. I need to talk to you about this. It would be great if you could help me out here and suggest me. I need to decide whether BYU is good enough or would I be endangered there.Thank you so much

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