As parents, we pay dearly to send our sons and daughters to Cornell. We do so for a variety of reasons. Faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell invest their professional lives working with students -- also for a variety of reasons. The goals of parents and the goals of faculty for our talented and precious young people mostly overlap. In some ways, they do not. We intend this booklet to help parents understand how Cornell faculty members structure undergraduate education and what they expect from students. We also want to explain why the college takes very seriously some things that some parents have trouble valuing -- for example, the residence requirement -- and why the college may seem to take less seriously some things that parents value highly -- for example, individual attention. This guide grew out of our annual briefings for parents of new students and in response to their recurring questions.
As parents, we want our children to be safe and happy and to live comfortably in and with the world. We want them prepared to thrive in the world independently. Going to college in our society is a passage from childhood to independent adulthood. We parents are expected to support our college-going offspring both emotionally and -- to the extent we are able -- financially. Children are considered independent adults after they graduate.
As faculty and advisors at Cornell, we urge our students to assimilate knowledge and develop many intellectual skills. We want them to share in the joys, hard work, and plain frustration of creating new knowledge, to find and test the limits of their interests and abilities. We want them to care about something in the larger world and to realize how their studies can prepare them to contribute to what they care about. We welcome the son or daughter you send us with basic character and personality already formed and try to enlarge that character and personality with knowledge and skepticism, with the ability to approach complex problems with rigor and imagination, and with skills to make decisions and act when evidence is not conclusive. We challenge your children; we quite consciously try to "discomfort" them.
We parents send our children to college with somewhat different agenda from those of faculty and advisors. Our parental point of view is understandably personal, that of Cornell faculty is social and intellectual. Our common goals are that students develop and value their own competence, graduate in a reasonable number of semesters, and become leaders in their professions and communities. In fact, our students do all three things. The average grade in the college is between B and B+. Some 90 percent graduate within five years of matriculation, engage in useful work, and become proud and enthusiastic alumni and alumnae. The college finds it necessary to suspend -- suspension implies return after a some time away -- only about one per cent of our students and actually dismisses permanently only about a dozen students (out of 4,000) a year. Those who do not succeed are bested by personal, medical, or financial problems. In more than 30 years, combined, at Cornell we have encountered fewer than a half-dozen students who persuaded us that they were working as hard and efficiently as they could and were nonetheless unable to produce satisfactory work.