I've been interested in the discussion below about BYU students who transfer to the U. I wonder how many are out there, why they went to the Y intially, and why they left.

I will start.

I came to BYU to:

1. Find a wife. I say this unabashedly and without reservation. If you are mormon, and are not from Utah, and want to marry LDS, where else would you go? Any out of stater (who comprise the majority at the Y) who doesn't list this in their top three is full of it.

2. Be around other LDS people. Having grown up in the east, I looked forward to being with more people like me. Ironically, I quickly found I didn't like the culture that accompanies large numbers of young zoobites.

3. All of the smart LDS kids in my area went there. It was just what we all did. It was assumed by our non-LDS friends that this is what we would do. It was part of our identity.

4. Get ready to go on a mission. I don't know what i thought would happen, but that somehow it would help me.

5. To get an education. I would put this further down if I could. Even though there were at least six in state schools that were better, I still chose the Y. I didn't buy the hype about it being "The Harvard of the West", and yes, that is how many zoobs see it.

Why I left:

1. I didn't feel I was getting an education. My degree, Poli-Sci, is only informative and interesting if you can engage in some discussion. The classes I had there were so conservatively biased that I felt like it was an indoctrination, rather than an education. By the way, I am a conservative. At the U, I have found that there is a nice mix of political views, and that boths sides are for the most part presented.

2. I hated Provo. It is a small town that breeds a small town mentality. Having grown up at the foot of the capital, the insular community and the pressure to be homogeneous grated on me. I wanted to have an opinion with out being looked at as an apostate or outsider. Any place that edits "Titanic" and then tries to defend it with a strait face......enough said.

3. When my stake president told us a stake preisthood meeting that if all of us weren't married by that time next year we would have cause to repent, I wanted to click my ruby slippers together and get out of there. I came to meet a girl sure but not to be forced to.

4. After checking into the U, I found out that inspite of what I had been told, it was every bit as good an undergrad school as the Y. Infact, you can flip a coin over their relative strengths and weaknesses. I know many zoobs heads will pop over this next statement, but the reason the Y is so hard to get into is because of the number of applicants, not the quality of education. There is not a relationship between entrance difficulty and quality the way there is at Ivy League schools. And before any of you ignorantly argue with me an this point, let me ask you: have you been to both? Trust me there is no difference in difficulty.

I don't think BYU is a bad school. I think it is a good school, but not the place for me. What amazed me being in SLC is how many people who are from Utah really dispise the Y and never wanted to go there. I only offer this as evidence of how silly the arguement, made by trueblue and others, that all people who criticize the Y are sour grapes about not getting in. This is just not true. In fact the arrogance of that opinion as well as the ignorance it manifests are typical of the miopic thinking I have referenced above. Maybe some people just need to get out more. One last thought: I was in the stands in '93 at cougar staduim wearing blue and witnessed teh utes try to tear down the goal posts. At first it pissed me off.......then I realized it was the coolest damn thing I'd ever seen. Better to go somewhere on the rise than somewhere on the decline I say. I look forward to seeing how many of people like me there are. Flame away zoobies.

I never actually attended the U, but I did intend to transfer from BYU to Utah for my last year-and-a-half of undergrad studies.

At the time, I was studying Near Eastern (Turkish) History. I felt that BYU was fine, but its Near Eastern Studies resources were quite limited in comparison to the U, which is nationally well-respected in the field. I had taken all of the available classes at the Y, but still wanted more.

Unfortunately, I was informed by the Utah History Department that not only would my general education credits not tranfer, but that I would also have to bring in the history textbooks and syllabi from every history class I had taken at the Y. These would then be reviewed by the History Dept. to determine whether they could pass muster at the U. I was a little insulted yet somewhat amused by their attitudes, which I ascribed to snootiness and rivalry. Utah's history department is respectable, but it's certainly not Ivy League caliber by any stretch of the imagination. It's a half-step above BYU in some fields; a half-step behind in a few others.

Of course, in any case, I wouldn't repeat my GE classes so I finshed my degree at the Y. Oh well, Utah's loss *g*.

As far as the provincial small-mindedness of the Provo and BYU communities...well, you can find small-mindedness anywhere you go: New York, LA, Paris, wherever (try dealing with the UCLA community; the most diverse bunch of freaking pinheads on God's green Earth). If you try to attack small-mindedness head-on, you'll simply end up with a headache. The best approach is to ignore it; it's amazing how little affect small-mindedness has on one personally if ignored. I had a constant headache my first year at BYU, after that I adopted a live and let live attitude, and enjoyed the rest of my time at BYU. Provo offered much more diversity and broadmindedness than most people suspect: you just had to look a little harder (of course, I grew up there, so I knew the ins-and-outs of the area).

This "difficulty" issue is a mute point. As a Harvard and Byu graduate I can say that Harvard was no more difficult than BYU. The degree of difficulty is not a measuring stick for quality of education. Harvard is much more difficult to get into and by definition will have a much more intelligent and accomplished student body; therefore you classroom discussions will be far more illuminating than a BYU or U classroom even if it were harder to get into the Y or the U. The curriculum at the top ivy league schools are not more difficult but you will get a better education because of your peers. I would agrue to some degree this holds true at BYU. I don't care if it is just as difficult at the U, overall the students at BYU are smarted and more accomplished than U students.

: I don't care if it is just as difficult at the U, overall the students at BYU are smarted and
: more accomplished than U students.

I really shouldn't knock your spelling because you can find plenty of spelling errors and typos in my posts but, I will challenge your logic.

Disclaimer: I'm talking norms not individuals, I firmly believe that the dominating variable in the "education equation" is the student. We all know that you can go to "Enormous St U" and find some students who can hold his/her own with the ones at "Ivy Covered College."

Now on to what is wrong with your argument:

One:
For Utah residents the U has effectivly open enrollment(I won't go into the pluses and minuses of this), so I will agree with you that the academic quality of BYU freshmen is, on average higher than the U. That is one reason the U has such a high freshman failure rate. however by the time you reach upper division classes you are not going to find much difference in the quality of students. In the many fields in which Utah is stronger than BYU you will find a better crop of students at Utah.

Two:
While you can certainly learn a lot from fellow students the people who have the greatest effect on your education are the faculty. IMO Utah has a superior faculty simply because A)it can draw from a much larger talent pool and B) it has much better research opportunites for Professors. The strange twist to this is that a high percentage of BYU faculty has at least one degree from the University of Utah. That probably explains why BYU does have some fine Professors ;-)

Vegas Ute

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