Page 8 - Providence Christian College - Fall 2018

CHOOSING THE RIGHT COLLEGE
A Case for the New Providence Academic Core
by Dr. David Corbin
Any college you will reAd About over the next few months has drawn together all its artistic, marketing, and promotional powers hoping that
the pictures shared – a beautiful green quad, shiny and wired classrooms, happy students, earnest and caring professors – will help cement them as a college choice for prospective students. Our magazine, filled with images, shows that we are,
in part, no exception to the broadly- applied idiom that “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
Yet, there’s the rub that will require discernment when navigating through the college admissions process. While pictures and images, and other artifacts for that matter, can be worth a thousand (and sometime more) words, an image’s value depends upon the truth of the image itself.
If a college, through its pictures and images, promises more than it delivers, the picture or image is, in part, a lie. Here, colleges and universities act no different than any person who wants to present
himself as something more than he is. Realizing that perception is perception and not reality is one of the hardest lessons we learn in life.
All colleges and universities promise that they will deliver, and you will receive an education. But what does it mean to “deliver” and to “receive” an education?
A diploma? A credential? New found educational status? The reality is that more than two million Americans receive college diplomas each year and that
more than 70 million Americans are in possession of a Bachelor’s degree. But does the reality of a greater number of degree holders mean that colleges have delivered on the promise of a more highly- educated and civil American society?
I would argue that, if our inability
as Americans to communicate with
one another when we disagree is representative of how well educated we are, then, there is no correlation between degrees awarded and civility attained.
The unfortunate reality is that the problem of societal illiberality is in part a product
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