Determinedly middle class (his dad is an X-ray technician, his mom a teacher's aide), Boland can afford Bucknell's $35,000 in tuition and fees only with the help of financial aid. Studious and abstemious, he works hard to keep up a 3.9 G.P.A. For Boland, the effort that has taken him from a modest background to the top ranks of an elite university bolsters his conservative beliefs on self-reliance
Emphasis mine, because, really, Bucknell?
Now, it's a fine school and all, but elite?
According to U.S. News and World Report, twenty-eight liberal arts colleges are more elite, including Mt. Holyoke, Holy Cross and Colgate. And then there's the university list, and you could pick out at least forty schools there which are more prestigious or elite.
Again, it's a fine school -- don't get me wrong -- but one which accepts almost 40% of its applicants and attracts less than one-fourth its students from outside the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states. A good school, sure, but not an elite one. Indeed, a recent article in its alumni magazine on the "arms race" between colleges noted that Bucknell's peer institutions were "Lehigh, Lafayette, Colgate, and Carnegie Mellon". Again, all good schools, but other than Carnegie Mellon, elite?
Bucknell's website wants you to know that Bucknell is located in "Lewisburg, a beautiful Victorian town that is ranked as one of America's best small towns in the book Making Your Move to One of America's Best Small Towns."
The website fails to mention that Lewisburg is also the home of a true elite institution, USP Lewisburg, a maximum security federal prison with 1218 currently admitted residents. I wonder if they ever have mixers with the students . . .
Unless the author was trying to make a sly point about political correctness -- that every institution is deemed "elite" nowadays, so as not to hurt anyone's feelings -- I'm sure Howell Raines will be running a correction later this week.
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