Parent / Student Speak

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.

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…