Excellent colleges or excellent students?

I’ve heard of many college programs that called themselves “excellent” and also of some others who say in their statements they “aim to pursue excellence through the services they offer”.  I am very clear they all are lying us.

Why?

Because every educational institution says they are excellent in what they do.  None of them would ever say they are “close to excellence” or “almost excellent”.  In the US those so-called “excellent” colleges can be rated by the alumni they have & prizes won by them.  In places without award winner alumni, their measure of excellence is a lot more abstract.

However, the only place that could really call himself excellent would surely say something like this,

The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop is the most renowned creative-writing program in the world. Sixteen Pulitzer Prize winners and three recent Poet Laureates are graduates of the program. But the school’s official position is that the school had nothing to do with it. “The fact that the Workshop can claim as alumni nationally and internationally prominent poets, novelists, and short story writers is, we believe, more the result of what they brought here than of what they gained from us,” the Iowa Web site explains. Iowa merely admits people who are really good at writing; it puts them up for two years; and then, like the Wizard of Oz, it gives them a diploma. “We continue to look for the most promising talent in the country,” the school says, “in our conviction that writing cannot be taught but that writers can be encouraged.” Read more…

And so, excellence cannot be taught or a college be an “excellent” institution unless their students are all excellent.

And how can you measure the excellence of your students?  Just by allowing in undergrad those guys and girls who have demonstrated to be talents in their subjects.

Do you know of any really excellent college or university?

I think St. John’s in Annapolis and Santa Fe could be one of them.  What do you think?