What is the purpose of a college education at Smart University? Ultimately, it is to give students the necessary intellectual tools to become better learners when they leave the school. It is to enable the students to give back to the wider community in their future professions and lives. It is to teach Smart students to fish for a lifetime, not simply to feed a Smart student for a day-and ideally, for Smart students learn how to 'teach themselves' and others how to fish for knowledge and resources throughout their lives. At Smart, we do not provide a practical education like a trade school that seeks to merely hone an individual's ability at a specific series of tasks. Rather, we strive to provide a holistic atmosphere of enrichment to formulate the character of an undergraduate.
             The ultimate criteria of admission is to find the students who can take the most from our environment, and give the most back to campus during their four years of residence, and later to the world. We should seek students that have strived to learn and profit the most from the environments in which they grew up and where they were educated. In the case of an individual from a disadvantaged background, who had to work to support his or her family, he or she should not be compared with an affluent student from a community with the best educational resources, a student that had leisure time for many private lessons, extracurricular activities and volunteer opportunities.
             However, that does not mean that the disadvantaged child should be accepted and the more privileged child should be rejected, rather that their resume should be critically evaluated in the context that produced the applicant. The child of a professor that grew up talking about Kant over the dinner table cannot be evaluated in the same way as a child from working-class parents. Even if the applicants are of the same level of ability and have the same determination to learn, ...