The Importance of Post Graduate Education

Every single university that has achieved excellence globally has done so by emphasizing post graduate education and research. MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Princeton, Purdue, Cornell, Oxford, Cambridge ... you name it.

And we have decided to stay in eternal obeisance to undergraduate students.

We are biting ourselves on our own arses.

If any university provides undergraduate education, it has to do it well. This goes without saying.

But if we are on a "oh we are so good..." trip merely because we can teach undergraduate classes, we, I repeat again for emphasis, are biting ourselves on our own arses. We are being immature, foolish, and I believe, intellectually lazy. Plus the excessive importance we give our undergraduate students results in way too many of them thinking they are "somebody" without having proven themselves in the real world first.

PS: Just to be clear: By research I DO NOT mean chasing quantitative metrics. That's the other extreme of nonsense. There is a clear middle path that aspires for excellence in both teaching and research. That's the only academically sensible path that has ever existed, and ever will.