Posted by:
Inspired Stupidity
(
)
Date: August 29, 2015 10:16AM
Like him/her, I apologize if this is offensive.
It does not surprise me that the acceptance rate of students offered positions is extremely high, yea even second unto Harvard. People who apply to BYU are Mormons who want the best possible Mormon education. There is no other option, so they accept the offers. People who don't care about Mormonism do not have such an overwhelming preference for a particular sort of school, so they'll select from a few offers.
More broadly, I work with a lot of top business leaders and attorneys. Very few of those have BYU business or law degrees. If you look at the websites for the great law firms--Davis Polk, Sullivan Cromwell, Cleary Gottlieb, etc--you won't see BYU law degrees. You occasionally see a BYU undergraduate degree followed by a grad degree at a more prestigious law school, but not a BYU J.D. The same is true of the great law schools themselves: BYU law degrees are extremely rare among professors at the top 10 or 20 law schools. So in that sense the education is not highly respected.
The business world is the same. There are many very successful Mormon businessmen, but if you look at their resumes, they did not do BYU MBAs. They may have done their undergraduate degrees at BYU, but they went elsewhere for their MBAs, graduate work in finance, etc. I think, a little less certainly, that the same is true of the great business schools. There are renowned business school professors who are LDS--Porter, Christensen, others--but do any of them have BYU MBAs? I don't think so.
There are fields in which BYU is solid. Engineering, accounting, things like that. But anything that requires radical, independent thought like history or economics or political science or theology, is crippled by the Mormon atmosphere. And the professional schools are hamstrung by Mormonism, an emphasis on Mormon extracurricular activities (church and church jobs), and the reduced number of potential students who want to go to a Mormon school. Also, there are serious contraints on the quality of the professors at BYU because once you have that name on your resume it is very difficult to move up in the academic world. I know one BYU law professor who joined the faculty when he was a TBM, lost his faith, and can't leave because no serious law school will consider him. Recognizing that BYU is a professional black hole, most great professors choose to teach elsewhere.
So I don't think BYU is a great university. The ranking systems are all suspect; they include things like student acceptance rate (high because Mormon students don't have high-end alternatives), student satisfaction rates (never speak ill of the church), and other things. BYU students are very sharp as well, since BYU has a huge captive audience of potential attendees who are only interested in Mormon universities. So BYU will come in high on a number of rankings. But most of the great Mormon professors, lawyers, and business people, felt it necessary to get a graduate degree (and possibly an undergraduate degree) elsewhere.
Again, I apologize if my opinions offend anyone.