Academic Opportunity Quotes

Millions of people would give literally anything to get their kids into a school like Harvard, and millions more simple admire it as another, brighter world.

No student should be forced to choose between following her faith and enjoying the benefits of a public education.

There were lots of smart black people at Harvard before Barack Obama, but none of them ever got to head up the law review. There has been a history of discrimination.

Even though I was sent to private school, it was purely because mum and dad wanted the best for me, and they worked their socks off in order to be able to give me that.

The Rhodes is something I've always really wanted. I would never have applied for it if I didn't really want to go. The opportunity to study at Oxford is amazing.

I feel like everyone who goes to The University of Texas is blessed and lucky to be there because they're getting a chance to be as good as they can be.

Since Germany seems bent upon getting rid of her brains, could not France offer to take in that “gray matter” that our neighbours seem to scorn? Could not the French government, above and beyond politics, offer Einstein, forced into exile by Germany, a chair in the College de France …

The first big break was winning a scholarship to go to Cambridge University. I was very lucky, because my parents couldn't have afforded a university education for me. Without a scholarship I couldn't possibly have gone.

Colleges and universities divide families by income, providing access to the best schools for those with accumulated wealth. Low- or moderate-income families are relegated to the less prestigious schools where the resources for advancement are fewer than those provided at better financed schools.

The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.

Look," said Janet, irritated, "if the thing you liked best to do in the world was read, and somebody offered to pay you room and board and give you a liberal arts degree if you would just read for four years, wouldn't you do it?

Public education must be viewed from the lens of providing each child with the learning environment that best meets his or her needs. If we can send a low-income child to a parochial school, knowing that his odds of attending college will increase as a result, then that should be our mission.

My whole life has been basically trying to find intelligent students or, you know, highly motivated students and giving them an opportunity to do good science.

It is worthwhile to engage in something that is close to one's heart. I had a scholarship. So if I donate money to give brilliant Chinese students an opportunity to study abroad, then this embodies everything I believe in: education, globalization, social mobility. I am an example of social mobility.

After an extensive interview he arranged for my weaknesses in foreign languages to be over-looked and so I started a Biology degree at Birmingham in 1967.

On the surface, public schools can seem egalitarian, especially with their websites' emphasis on words such as 'connection,' 'community,' and 'choice.' Yet despite this democratic vocabulary, money makes a big difference.

I am passionate about higher education and am hugely impressed by Portsmouth's mission to encourage students from every walk of life to excel.

I had been offered fellowships to enter as a graduate student at either Harvard or Princeton. But the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous, since I had not actually won the Putnam competition... Thus Princeton became the choice for my graduate study location.

Hunter High School was a real turning point for me. I found out about its existence through the music school. Nobody I knew had gone to one of these special high schools, and my teachers didn't think it was possible to get in. But Hunter sent me a practice exam, and I studied what I needed to know to pass the exam.

Let's make the SAT and PSAT free so everyone has a chance to succeed.

It was a given at UCSB that if there was a role that called for a person of color, it was going to be handed to me. There were certain times when maybe I didn't try as hard. Going to Yale was a way more diverse experience.

I was a pretty unsavvy applicant, and I am grateful that the dean of admissions at Princeton chose to take a chance on a girl from an average public high school in southern Virginia.

I ended up turning down a full scholarship of music at the conservatory to pay to go to cooking school.

I was lucky that science fair was mandatory at my high school in inner-city Buffalo.

Let's say you work at a university or a college. You are a cog in the one of the great inequality producing machines this country has known.