With great honor, we, the community of Pepperdine University, accept this award of being the best A+ School for B students. After many years of being featured in the top rankings of most beautiful schools in the nation, we proudly accept this new award as recognition that we are more than the school with the most gorgeous campus (with beautiful individuals – can’t forget to mention that). What an honor – to be best after the Ivy Leagues.
We can now understand how Hollywood actors and actresses feel when they win an Oscar for Supporting Actor or Actress. Pepperdine wins the award of best supporting school in America. Does a B grade really reflect the values, morals and education of an institution, or is it just a label that must be created to fulfill the urge to give status and rankings to everything?
For these past few days, Pepperdine students spammed Facebook and Twitter with The Huffington Post article, “11 Best Colleges for ‘B Students,’” based off the US News & World Report. U.S. News described these schools as strongly rated institutions that also “accept a significant number of students with nonstratospheric transcripts.”
The methodology used for creating the list of colleges includes being in the top three quarters of their categories in the 2013 edition of Best Colleges, being in or slightly below the top half of their categories of the 2013 ranking, having an average freshman-retention rate and of course, accepting a meaningful proportion of non-“A” students.
But in short, are these parameters a determining factor of who Pepperdine students are? Why is the “B” factor a relevant issue for most people?
As an institution that prides itself for its focus in building a close community and being a small, private, Christian university, we understand and know the commitment that our faculty and students have to create deeper relationships that goes beyond the classroom.
By being in a small community and having considerably smaller average classroom size than most schools, Waves students are able to connect with professors in a meaningful and impactful way. It is common to find faculty and students chatting outside of the classroom about career opportunities, values, hobbies, internships, foreign programs and other topics not related to school. Rather than having a common professor-student relationship, it is not unusual to see this become a mentor-mentee bond.
In fact, professors often open their homes to have students over for breakfast or lunch while celebrating the end of a great semester. Professors truly invest in getting to know the students for who they are as an individual rather than just seeing them based on their academic performance. Because of this, students at Pepperdine are perhaps more likely to receive a more personal and possibly more impressive letter of recommendation than they might receive from a professor to whom they are merely a number in a vast auditorium of students.
Take, for instance, our commitment to our international programs. The Institute of International Education ranked Pepperdine as the No. 2 school with the highest number of students who study abroad for a full academic year. In today’s business world, the globe is becoming flatter, and thus, the need to understand diversity and different cultures is imminent. Pepperdine’s emphasis on the IP department is a clear understanding of the importance of leaving this Malibu bubble to explore new territories.
Also, Pepperdine provides great financial assistance to help students pay for their education. Approximately 75 percent of our student body receive some type of financial assistance through scholarships, loans or work study. Many students choose to be Waves because they get better financial opportunities than other institutions can offer to them.
On a campus where full-time students have time to take 15 to 18 units every semester, where many have two to three jobs on campus in addition to internships, mission trips and even have time to participate in Songfest, we understand why many consider Pepperdine’s students to be overachievers. If that’s what it is to be considered a “B” student, we definitely should appreciate our lives because we have bigger #pepperdineproblems.
B is for betterment, and we can only hope that we will continue to balance our over-commitment to do what we like to do, where our passions really are. Perhaps next year, we will become the average of the best, but for now, I guess we need to content ourselves in being the worst of the best, and the best of the almost best.
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