There is an emergent trend to establish undergraduate fellowship offices in colleges and universities throughout the country. Resources are being allocated for this purpose by high level administrators, allocations that suggest national scholarship competitions are priority endeavors in higher education. But to what end? Why bother? Who benefits? Are there justifications for these institutional investments?

There are justifications. In top-tier institutions, however, justifications are not limited to self serving if beneficial statistics from score keepers who seek comparative advantage via silver bullets for marketing and public relations. Rather, the justifications for these attainment oriented initiatives are that they reify distinctive, even inspiring, institutional values. As with good amateur athletic programs, fellowship initiatives can elevate a school whether or not students ultimately prevail in competition. A worthy effort emphasizing fellowships is as much about promoting attainment for students in the arena of character and intellect as it is about bragging rights and win-loss records for institutions in the arena of comparative advantage. Discerning educational clientele understand this and search for institutions with lofty precepts that imply people who do things well are special. These clientele include administrators who seek to promote human attainment over the pedestrian management of academic form (“teaching, research, and public service,” to coin a phrase) and educationally engaged parents who seek, at reasonable cost, a quality undergraduate experience for their children.

Realistically, national scholarship winners do bring comparative advantage to a university. A university that consistently fosters winning consequences for its students enhances its academic reputation. It is more recommendable as a place to go to school or to be employed. Externally validated competitions increase the value of an institutional degree for all students. Most importantly, however, is the value laden observation that national scholarship initiatives (winning or not) enable a university or college to associate itself with a conception of quality rooted in human attainment. In institutions that aspire to major status without qualification, no leadership objective rivals the need to clarify and project an evaluable conception of quality. A visible conception of quality is a beacon on the institutional horizon that provides an indication of institutional thought. Such clarification necessarily precedes and informs the creation of policy.

Has anyone ever encountered an institution that wasn’t devoted to Quality? Apparently not. Read all those shopworn mission statements. Alas the important sentence, the one that answers Barbara Tuchman’s question “What does ‘Q’ mean?”, or Francis Hesselbein’s hortatory plea to tell us why you do what you do, is seldom there. Yet these are the questions and issues that illuminate the institutional soul. Here is an answer to the question: Quality in any institution means it promotes and produces externally validated human attainment. A quality institution is one that turns talent into attainment. Quality in all endeavors (business, athletics, the arts, the military, government, academe, you name it) is measured by human attainment either relative (“be all you can be” as the Army used to say) or absolute (“be all anyone can be” as Peleus advised Achilles as he set out for Troy). At the undergraduate level, fellowship initiatives promote high attainment for all students. That’s educational “Q;” and that’s why we should pursue them.

Students benefit immeasurably from the preparation process for national scholarships. Again, those student benefits accrue win or lose. In the academic arena, scholarships for graduate study that emphasize broad-based leadership have application deadlines toward the end of an undergraduate career. There is no more appropriate moment for a student to take stock of those qualities of character, intellect, and achievement that make up a young life to that point and that are relevant to deliberations about the future. Few activities are as effective for this noble purpose as writing a reflective personal essay, ever a requirement for competitive scholarships. It’s tough to write an essay that is an amalgam of intellectual autobiography, imagination, and aspiration. Nevertheless, deliberation counts. Who am I? What do I want to do with the rest of my life? Is there anything I want to do? Do I have drive and special talents? If I were to do anything in the world what would it be and how might I get there? What is the balance between risk and being realistic? Would a national scholarship be appropriate or not appropriate to help me get to where I want to be?

Faculty mentors and fellowship offices overseen by individuals who are themselves intellectually engaged and not just brokers of application materials are in a position to be of crucial assistance in this profound act that combines teaching and critical self analysis. Indeed, if an institution believes quality is measured by attainment then it has an obligation to offer assistance and even persuasion to turn talent into attainment. That’s “Q,” and in a state university it places both an emphasis and an outcome for high attainment on the institutional loading dock while keeping middle class mothers and fathers out of the poor house, an objective consistent with the cherished American principle of equality of educational opportunity.

The exhortation to push talented students to high attainment is no bunk. Although not as well known as his Sorbonne speech of 1910, Theodore Roosevelt had it right in his Chicago Hamilton Club speech on “The Strenuous Life” in 1899: “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” A favorite anecdote concerns a Pitt student who when approached about being a scholarship candidate informed me that, “My kind of people don’t do that.” Following persuasion, but with no small reluctance and a lot of trepidation, the student ultimately made a commitment to go for the scholarship, to spend the extensive time required to garner expansive recommendations from knowledgeable individuals, and to engage in the seemingly interminable discussions and the rewriting of multiple drafts that make for an incisive personal essay. The result was of great benefit to the student: self knowledge, gratifying selection as one of twelve people to be granted a state interview in highly competitive Pennsylvania, the inescapable conclusion from observation and interaction by the student that, despite initial doubt and trepidation, she was as able as any of the Philadelphia interviewees, and no scholarship. Guess who won the Rhodes the next year.