Everyone here at ASU has undergone the process of applying to various universities and picking the best fit. When I went through the process, I blindly assumed that the ideal university was an Ivy-League, MIT or something similar. I, like too many others, believed that ASU was a fallback option: The place where “anyone can get in.” As it turns out, so many “get in” to ASU that we can put out more than nearly any other university.
In 2014 ASU enrolled 92,238 undergraduate and 19,355 graduate students. Besides constituting a group large enough to populate Carlsbad, California, those 111,593 students open doors to opportunities that didn’t exist before ASU. At Harvard a student picks from 49 undergraduate degrees; at ASU we pick from over 600. That means a student here can pick from over 360,000 different combinations of majors and minors.
More alarming than the diversity of study here is the diversity of the students doing the studying — on any given day I hear at least four different languages. ASU is statistically the 9th most diverse college in the United States; with so many students, ASU must be providing an appeal to students from, well, everywhere. At Princeton there are about 590 international undergraduate students; at ASU there are nearly 9,000. There are thousands of students of all different ethnicities and backgrounds here, hailing from over 120 different countries. That creates an environment that simply cannot be replicated by a small enclave of extremely high-achieving students, and such an environment is of rapidly increasing value today for two main reasons.
First, the diversity at ASU mass-produces innovation. Ideas from all over the place can find themselves at one university, in one classroom; skills from all over the place can do the same. Access to stores of resources, both intellectual and fiscal, provides the materials to realize ideas and utilize skills. That process yields unlimited innovation, which can be seen in areas from our EPICS engineering program to our SkySong entrepreneurship program.
Furthermore, the groundwork for innovation here, consisting of students and resources, has attracted excellent faculty members who otherwise would have worked in the private sector. It’s of course no accident, then, that ASU made its way to the top of the list of innovative universities.
The second reason our diverse community is valuable is that, in today’s ever-globalizing economy, a diverse student body is perfectly adapted for success. Not only is the ASU student body already both intra-nationally and globally connected by its roots, but also students are connected on a person-to-person basis. We communicate across differing ethnicities, cultures, backgrounds and sometimes languages. Whether those interactions take place on an intramural basketball court, in a classroom or in a residence hall, they sculpt an adaptive and broadminded student body. Such qualities put us ahead in the national and global marketplace where those abilities are not only useful, but more essential every day.
ASU will continue to prove that universities should pride themselves on the students they let in, not on how many they turn away. We can expect to see many global leaders in all fields of study continue to emerge from ASU, and with those emergences the University's image will continue to become one of excellence and invention — an image it has been steadily adopting for the last decade. The “party school” tales of old have faded away, and stories of innovation and success now dominate the spotlight.
Future college students should know: ASU wants you, and there are more reasons all the time for you to want ASU. The higher-educational ideal is moving away from small, elite communities of like-minded students and toward robust, multifaceted powerhouses for innovation, and ASU is the proud standard-bearer.
Related Links:
Fraternities, Greek organizations push for diversity
ASU leads most diverse faculty in its history
Reach the columnist at gheiler@asu.edu or follow @heilergeorge on Twitter.
Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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