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Why I Chose UTD

I, Aditya, am a junior at the University of Texas at Dallas, and looking back, UTD has proven to be a strong choice for my academic and professional goals—especially as someone interested in STEM, research, and real-world application. UTD strikes a balance between rigor and opportunity, where what you put in truly determines what you get out.

College administrators seem unable to fathom the obvious: eroding higher education’s core purpose doesn’t go unnoticed. If ChatGPT can write essays, ace exams and tutor, what exactly is the university selling? Why pay tens of thousands for an experience increasingly automated? Why dedicate your life to teaching if it’s reduced to prompt engineering? Why retain tenured professors whose role seems quaint, medieval and redundant? Why have universities at all? Students and parents have certainly noticed the rot. Enrollments and retention rates are plunging, especially in public systems like the CSU. Students are reasoning, rightly, that it makes little sense to take on crushing debt for degrees that may soon be obsolete.

To mark the centennial of both institutions, The Duke Endowment has awarded Duke University $100 million to support the university’s vision for the next 100 years of higher education. The largest single award in the university’s history, the investment will expand access to a Duke education.

Loyola University Chicago has announced that it’s received the largest private donation in its history - a $100 million gift from John and Kathy Schreiber. The gift will be used to establish full scholarships including room and board. The University said that it and the Schreibers were aiming to create a $500 million endowment that would make the scholarship resources permanent. The Schreibers’ gift is the first for this endowment, which, when fully funded, could support hundreds of Loyola students a year.

Duke University announced it had received $50 million from the Duke Endowment, a private endowment that focuses on supporting causes in North Carolina and South Carolina. That contribution completed the second half of a $100 million investment announced in 2019. It marks the largest award Duke University has ever received.

Cornell University revealed on June 4th that it had received a donation of $24 million from K. Lisa Yang to support its bioacoustics work. The donation was targeted for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, founded in the 1980s to gather information about ecosystem health and animal communication through sound...

The Gates Millennium Scholars (GMS), funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was established in 1999 to provide outstanding African American, American Indian/Alaska Natives, Asian Pacific Islander Americans.

Whenever I and my parents were discussing paying for college, the relatively comfortable jobs that my parents had meant that I was going to be paying full price. Although, this was not something I rather liked there was an equity element to it that I always appreciated…