Linfield College was singled out by The Huffington Post as one of seven U.S. colleges worth their tuition.
The news website said Linfield offers innovation, diversity and a focus on quality teaching — all at an affordable price tag.
“Many schools have lost touch with the idea of actually providing a robust education for the country’s youth, focusing instead on outfitting campuses with overpriced amenities,” The Huffington Post reported.
“On the bright side, there are still schools scattered across the country that seek to educate rather than entertain.” Linfield is one of those schools, the article said.
The column linked to a recent guest blog in The Washington Post by Claudia Dreifus and Andrew Hacker, which placed Linfield among the top 15 schools in the nation for offering quality education at an accessible price.
“Linfield offers a fine education on an unassuming budget,” Dreifus and Hacker report in their guest column. The college spends significantly less per student than an Ivy League school like Swarthmore, but “its faculty is just as good and its students just as inquiring.”
Hacker and New York Times reporter Dreifus take American colleges and universities to task in their new book, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — and What We Can Do About It.
The two authors and professors say many schools have lost track of their primary mission: teaching college students. Instead, they say, many professors negotiate to teach as little as possible, while colleges lure students with expensive sports facilities and dorms, pushing a four-year education at a private school to a quarter million dollars.
In an earlier Atlantic interview the authors said Linfield “professors care. They spend time with the students.” And on their education blog they said Linfield “manages to educate its bright students without frills. Its campus is attractive, but simple. Teaching matters there.”
The book, now generating headlines across the country, is the result of several years of interviews with students, government officials and higher education administrators.
