The Middle Ground
The best regional universities combine low costs, high academic standards and an intimate atmosphere
The 558 regional colleges and universities in the U.S. News survey occupy a vast middle ground of American higher education. Compared with better-known national universities and colleges, their student bodies tend to be more local and home-grown, their costs generally lower and their campuses less pressured. Here are the top-ranked schools--all repeat winners--in each of the category's four regions:
NORTH
Academic innovations helped make Worcester Polytechnic Institute the top ranked of 168 Northeastern regional universities in the U.S. News survey for the second consecutive year. And they took place not just on WPI's hilly campus in central Massachusetts but 3,500 miles away in Guayaquil, Ecuador, as well. That's where WPI established its 16th overseas studies program. As they do at each of the other overseassites--which range from London and St. Petersburg to Bangkok--students at WPI-in-Ecuador spend two months working with local officials on projects designed to apply American technical know-how to environmental and business problems.
When students return to Worcester from Ecuador, they can complement their on-the-ground experiences by enrolling in some of WPI's 18 new and forthcoming courses in Spanish, Latin American culture and international politics. These days, says Associate Dean Lance Schachterle, "A global perspective is important because students going into American manufacturing have to design products that make sense in other countries."
SOUTH
It was a message graduating classes have been hearing for centuries, but novelist Tom Clancy, in an address at North Carolina's Wake Forest University, drove the point home especially hard. "The grades you will get in the real world will be far harsher than anything you have complained about here," Clancy told last May's graduates at "Wake," which ranked No. 1 among the 147 Southern regional schools for the sixth year in a row.
Although life on the university's bucolic campus in Winston-Salem hardly resembles "the real world," Wake Forest strives to prepare its 3,650 undergraduates for life after college by encouraging them to participate in volunteer programs during the school year or in one of a dozen summer internships with nonprofit groups. Wake students usually arrange the summer internships themselves, and the university pays them $1,800 each.
Melody Miller, a senior sociology major from Winston-Salem, found that her internship--working with local teenagers who were on probation for crimes such as shoplifting--was "a real eye-opener. I didn't feel very effective in a classroom environment," she says. "I learned a lot more than I could have from a book."
Other Wake undergraduates take time off during the school year to work with the Volunteer Service Corps, a student-run organization that channels volunteers into local shelters, soup kitchens and homes for children where they work closely with the needy. Although 700 students joined the VSC last year, cochairman Matthew Rebello, a senior from Boston, is still not satisfied. His goal: to raise the number of student volunteers to 1,000. Rebello confidently predicts: "We're going to plaster this campus with volunteerism."
MIDWEST
At a time when other schools are deferring maintenance and scaling back expansion plans, Illinois Wesleyan--for the fourth year in a row the top ranked of 131 Midwestern universities in the U.S. News survey--has embarked on an ambitious scheme to further enhance facilities on its quiet campus in residential Bloomington. The United Methodist-affiliated school recently launched a $58 million fund drive--the largest in its 142-year history--that among other projects will finance a long-needed $21 million science center and a $15 million athletic facility. "The new buildings are a mark of our financial health," says Acting Provost Roger Schnaitter.
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