TROUBLE AT VANGUARD UNIVERSITY?
Our guess is that most Costa Mesans couldn't tell you the location of Vanguard University.
That may be part of Vanguard's problems, although its relative invisibility isn't even hinted at in this article in the OCR about Vanguard. LINK
So where is Vanguard?
It's right next to Costa Mesa City Hall.
A casual observer might think Vanguard is part of the City Hall complex. It's so close to City Hall that the buzz a few years ago was that Vanguard wanted to buy City Hall and perhaps the Costa Mesa police station to incorporate them into its campus.
Apparently, if the OCR is correct, Vanguard now has financial and accreditation problems, so any realistic thoughts about buying the adjacent City owned property are probably on a very distant back burner.
Colleges and universities, no less than private businesses, need to attract attention to themselves, in a positive way--if they are to stay viable and healthy.
Some do this via their sports teams--mostly football--others do it by attracting top talent in specific academic fields and some are able to do it with both sports and academics or in other ways.
Maybe part of what Vanguard needs to do is take a look at how it can become more visible and better known.
MEANWHILE OVER AT UCI
UCI, by contrast, seems to understand that a university needs to be in the public eye to attract top talent and money.
When UCI wanted to start a law school from scratch--no small task--it immediately hired as its first dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, one of the highest profile law professors in the country, and a guy who doesn't mind being in front of TV cameras. You might say that Chemerinsky loves the cameras, even if the love is not returned.
But UCI has now done something else that is interesting. It apparently realizes that you need the brightest students to prime the school's pump and at the same time start some very bright people down the conveyor belt toward graduation so they will help build your reputation once they get out into the real world. So, UCI is offering free tuition to its incoming first class of law students.
Something had to be done to get the best and brightest to consider UCI Law, a start-up with no reputation, remember.
Most top law students know that their futures are going to be very bright if they graduate from Harvard or Yale or a couple of similar universities. And, they'll be asking themselves what their future is going to be if they graduate from a a start-up in, where? Irving, er, Irvin, ah, Ermin, Irvine, California? Hmmm. One thing that bright people often do is think ahead.
Will Chemerinsky and free tuition work to snag some Harvard or Yale bound students? Possibly. At least it should attract some who have applied to Harvard or Yale, and who almost made it, but who came up a little short.
So, where did Chemerinsky get his own law degree? Harvard.
Hmmm. One wonders. If UCI's Law School had been a start-up back when Chemerinksy was a student, and had applied to Harvard, would Chererinsky have decided to go to UCI instead because of the free tuition? And, if he had, would he now be as famous as he is, or would he be out chasing ambulances in some small town?
That's not a meaningless question. That's the same one top law students will be asking themselves.
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Those are our opinions. Thanks for reading them.
