Exactly!
Our history is rich in tradition and lore and we haven’t tapped into it. We don’t need to go off and invent things to make us cool. We are cool. UH just needs to start taking itself more serious. Our inability to do so has been one of the most frustrating experiences as an alumn.
The sister city idea is awesome.
Have we tried to establish partnerships with a top university in either of those cities? This could be a great perk for UH students.
NO STUDENT should graduate from the University of Houston without knowing our culture, history, and tradition (including the Coat of Arms).
We aren’t building a degree factory here…we are building a life long connection…relationship…a family with a University.
Here’s another UH related Historical Story, that revolves around the story of Hugh Roy Cullen’s Grandson, Enrico Di Portanova. As I’m sure (i hope) many here know, Roy Cullen essentially created the university of Houston.
Great idea. Here are two we can call:
Might as well celebrate our Scottish roots!
Umm, I don’t actually agree with this.
Bama, Iowa, Indiana, Mizzou, Auburn, Penn State, South Carolina, MSU, and Iowa State, to name a few schools, have higher or similar acceptance rates than UH. Yet they don’t have problems getting students to games or getting donations. OTOH, Ga Tech, Pitt, Miami, Maryland, UCLA and MN have lower admission percentages and have trouble getting people to attend games.
I don’t think admissions standards is the issue. If UH suddenly became, say, the next UCLA, our problems would get worse, not better. That is, if the goal is to get fans in the stands.
Schools like UCLA, Pitt and Ga Tech are only in P4 conferences due to geography, past performance and luck. Also, this is actually very important, UH is only 97 years old, and has only been a public school since the 1960’s. So we started off with two strikes. I would say that a good comparison for UH would be schools like MIT, UCF, South Florida, Georgia State or Temple. These schools all started as sort of normal schools or schools for working class people; they were not intended to become top level research universities. Yet, two of them are AAU schools, Temple is one of the better urban schools in the U.S., and Georgia State is moving up. UH is way ahead of both Ga State and I think has moved past Temple. To me, the fact that UH is a top 100 public university is a testament to our college and its students. We have accomplished a lot in the years since I attended.
BTW, the Bauer and Cullen Colleges are already quite competitive and not easy to get into as is. Bauer has higher requirements than Mays and similar to Indiana’s Kelley School, which is probably the best undergrad public school biz program out there (maybe with Michigan).
Fact is, if you were to make UH into a quasi-private university, I think the school would lose students and eventually would lose funding from the state. Our sports programs would suffer, especially the basketball and football programs. You think we have problems now? Every year Ga Tech discusses dumping sports. Many want to become more like MIT.
You left out the college of engineering.
Keep embarassing, yourself!
My takes are at least aligned with what Khator and Fertitta want us to become.
You can keep hoping we remain a blah . commuter school all you want but it won’t change the fact we are moving AWAY from that direction.
But you can keep reminiscing about yesteryear…we are on to bigger and better things!
You’re hilarious. You disrespect UH calling it a commuter school that’s mediocre and I should be embarrassed? You should have gone to traditional UT, you sound like a longhorn.
Mind, that all this because of football attendance. lol.
And by my count, that’s EIGHT professional schools!
No…i selected UH over UT (after visiting UT btw) but I lived on campus and arrived as a "traditional student "
That’s why I’m defending UH against people like you who want to keep UH in the 1980s.
I see your point, but I contend with your notion of “we are what we are” (perhaps a way of saying we’ve plateaued) and that the onus is on us alums to change our image (if I understood you correctly).
I believe there is tremendous opportunity for us to improve both in perception and our ranking, and that is by making the school incredibly more selective, at least with certain programs at first. I grant you Bauer, but yes, even Bauer can be more selective.
I brought it up before in other post, but a perfect case study to look at is Northeastern University in Boston. NU used to be a school that was considered a fallback to a fallback. Their admissions standards were low and it had the perception of a commuter school even though it was private. And to top it off, they were surrounded by ELITE colleges.
So what changed? Admissions standards. That was it.
It took about 25 - 30 years along with key investments in infrastructure, but Northeastern is now ranked around 50 in US News. There are even blog posts about parents being surprised that their kids were ecstatic getting into NU, confused as to why their kids would want to go to THAT school and discovering how elite it had become.
Can you imagine something similar happening to UH? An Aggie/UT/ parent hears their son or daughter yell with excitement that they’re going to be an Engineering Coog next Fall, but the parent is confused because they’re wondering why would their son or daughter want to go to Coog High? Then they realize that UH is in the top 50 in US News for national universities and top 15 for Engineering.
Of course, there are key differences between UH and NU, but NU’s ascension was a concerted effort to brand itself tangibly as opposed to sticking to the status quo and spending millions on ads saying they were awesome.
As someone who has attended multiple schools and lived on-campus at UH, the ways in which UH is lacking go much deeper than campus life. For example, Auburn’s Career Development and Corporate Relations department blows ours out of the water, and that would be true if AU never played another game of Football and disbanded every one of their frats. In the departments at UH that I’m familiar with (Economics and Psychology) our curricula are extremely unstructured, to such an extent that if I were interested in hiring Coogs, it would be close to impossible to set a baseline expectation for what they actually know.
UH provides meaningfully poor career outcomes and support, even relative to other schools that I’d go as far as to call “bad,” like St. Thomas. That’s not to say that you can’t make it from here, but “you can do it, but you’ll have to work twice as hard for half as much” isn’t really that appealing to a prospective student. Most of the departments – including several of the largest – are treated as an afterthought by the University. That’s a big problem, and “recruit traditional students” doesn’t solve it.
This is why i’m amazed we are getting push back by people, on this board, when we suggest the 100s of little things UH can do to improve itself.
See Norbert, it’s not just me!
Either they have their head in the sand or have a personal reason for keeping UH down.
THANK YOU.
Great observation about Auburn.
And again, this goes to my frustration about UH as an alumni. We have to start taking ourselves more serious.
Yep, good point. My mistake.
Never said that. That’s just your perception of anyone with a differing view. You sure project a lot of things, don’t you.
Very good points, and goes back to my point above about “customer service”. This is exactly what I was talking about.
I think UH is like many colleges (maybe not Auburn), in that its career services sort of focuses on the Biz and STEM schools and then leaves everyone else to fend for themselves. It was certainly the case when I was a student. As an Econ major, I had to do my own footwork. I was lucky to some extent in that I was also a business minor and thus was able to access Bauer’s career services. Other than that, I had to speak to professors and such for internships, co-ops, etc.
Hold up. UH has problems, but the wet dream of recruiting a bunch of frat kids or whatever that you espouse in every thread where this comes up isn’t the solution. Making our student body look more like Bama or Arkansas (objectively worse schools!) and pushing out the working-class students that have been the backbone and lifeblood of this university for the last century in favor of kids who don’t want to be here in the first place recruiting a more “traditional” student body isn’t the answer. That’s all window-dressing and appearances and papers over the actual reason that UH alumni don’t have more school pride, which is that for most of us, the school spent four years telling us to shut up and give us their money and leave them alone and then turned around as soon as we walked across the stage at graduation and said “wow, weren’t those some nice memories? You should give us more money because you love us so much!” Having Barstool Sports rate UH one of their best “party schools” won’t make it possible to get in touch with an advisor or get the Bursar to disburse your loans on time.
Going back to the “alumni don’t send their kids here” conversation, a lot of that is due to the fact that people want our kids to have easier and better lives than we had, and UH doesn’t credibly provide a path to that.
I never singled out Fraternities/Sororities however, networking is a HUGE skill to have mastered during your professional life.
Whether students go Greek OR are active in other student groups, the skills learned in organizing events, working as a team (with multiple personalities), running a project’s budget, communicating your ideas with others, etc. are great lessons to learn in an environment like your college years.
The student at the opposite end of the spectrum, attends class and runs to their vehicle the second their class ends.
Which type of student should we go after?
Of course, every single one of those skills is learned to a greater degree by working a job, but you openly bemoan the portion of our student body that needs to do that because they don’t spend their time on campus. Those are, by and large, the students who “run to their vehicle the second their class ends.”
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