New Curricula for a New Way of Teaching 99 No. Of course not. If your child gets into Yale, send her there. It is a great place. But you should know what Yale actually has to offer and what it doesn’t. If your child wants to be a professor, Yale is the place. If your child wants to be an intellectual, Yale is the place. If your child wants to go to law school, Yale is the place. If your child wants to hobnob with the best and brightest, Yale is the place. If your child wants to have a fun time for 4 years, Yale is the place. Then what is wrong? There is a problem only if you think that there is a different reason to go to college than the reasons I have listed above. Oh. There is this other problem. Many of the other 3,000 colleges are trying very hard to imitate Yale. They attempt to provide similar experiences and they can’t pull it off. Yale is a unique place. The na- tion can afford only so many unique places, however. We cannot af- ford having the main university of a state thinking it is Yale, as my state university friend suggests. If every university has as its main fo- cus research and not education, then the best and brightest of each state will be trained, not necessarily willingly, to be academics rather than practitioners. There will be a great many students who came to school for an education that will help them in their future lives who will be disappointed to find out that that is not the type of education being offered. Professors at Yale are playing the prestige game. Unfortunately, they are hardly alone in this. My state university professor again: We definitely want to be part of the superstar system but we have no superstars. If we had them, we would probably lose them to Harvard and Yale anyway. Nevertheless, we are obsessed with the National Rankings put out by places like U.S. News and World Report. Faculty and deans say they are not obsessed with them, but rankings are an important part of the evaluation process and shape