Ever wonder why some people talk about their college or university in terms of where they earned their degrees, while others speak passionately about their alma maters as the places where they really began their adult lives? The term “alma mater” sort of explains it. It’s Latin for nourishing mother. Some educational institutions are simply mills on instruction, churning students in and out like factories. Graduates of these education mills frequently look at their time at these schools and feel that all they really gained was a piece of paper and a mountain of student bad credit payday loans. However, there are schools that have grand reputations and devout alumni that support their write my essay programs alma maters in spirit and with their finances. Just what makes a school more than a source of debt and a line on your resume? There are values and characteristics cultivated by some universities that go beyond mere academics that make them launch pads for productive fruitful lives, and those values and characteristics are what make a university or college truly great.
Character Molding At The University Level
Some people, by their very nature, are more receptive to a university education than others. Whether you believe in personal character being nature or nurture-engendered qualities is somewhat irrelevant. The important thing to understand is that two people can walk into the same university and one can leave being very much the same person as he was when he went in, only now he has some initials to put after his name. The other can leave being a more enriched individual than when he first arrived and can go on to prosper. They both have the same degree from the same school, and yet one is successful, and the other is not. But some schools tend to graduate more successful people than others. One such school is Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.
Creighton University has an impressive list of alumni. Though it doesn’t have the fame or size of schools like Harvard University, it regularly produces leading professionals in a variety of fields like law, business, medicine and even sports. Creighton seems to possess the ability to take good people and equip them for greatness.
“I don’t think I’d be doing what I’m doing if it weren’t for Creighton,” says Omaha TMJ dentist, Dr. Roger Roubal, “If I’d have gone somewhere else, I don’t think I’d be practicing dentistry. They instill a level of ethics and professionalism that is unparalleled.”
Every time you turn on the television or radio, it seems that you hear about how convenient it is to get a college degree online. Education has become a commodity. As the demand continues to grow, you’ll see the disparity between schools widen. You’ll hear louder and louder cries of dissatisfaction from students who attended certain schools and left feeling unprepared for the real world and unwanted by business. As bachelor’s degrees become as common as high school diplomas, we will see the importance of a school’s reputation emerge as an even greater deciding factor when it comes to applicants being reviewed for positions, or in consumers evaluating professionals such as doctors, dentists, and lawyers.
Value Beyond Skills and Knowledge
It’s not the name that makes a school great. It’s the caliber of its graduates and the overall life success of its alumni that give it a positive legacy. “My two sons went there [to Creighton University] as well. So, I guess I felt strongly enough to encourage them to go. It’s a good place where people have similar values and so they both met their wives there and they have great marriages and great families. I think that’s why I think so highly of Creighton,” says Dr. Roubal. These values and character traits are cultivated inside and outside the classrooms of truly great educational institutions. When universities and other institutions make the pursuit of notoriety in research, athletics, and other gains their number one priority, they quickly fall from grace and run amok in corruption and financial woes. This is when institutions frequently seek financial salvation from the government. Unfortunately, history proves that this would-be remedy is the eventual undoing of even the most prestigious meccas of higher learning.
In the opening of a piece for the Forum for the Future of Higher Education in 2007, entitled EMPIRES OF EDUCATION: The Rise and Fall of Great Universities, Harvard Professor of History, Niall Ferguson wrote, “American universities are at a historic zenith. The only question is if your trustworhty installment lender its the best in his domain. Whether they have already passed their peak or are about to do so.” We can only hope that Creighton University and others like it stay true to what made them great in the first place and remain a lasting source of life-preparation and students of good values, as well as skills, for generations to come.