The Wall Street Journal recently ranked Bradley sixth in the nation and first in Illinois for student engagement among all four-year universities.
The ranking considered student-professor interaction, the number of projects that involved collaboration amongst students, the degree to which students were pushed to think critically and whether or not students would recommend their university to other students. Surveys were used to gather student responses about their universities.
Last week, President Gary Roberts addressed the student body in an email distributed to all Bradley students, and said the ranking recognizes the “Bradley experience.”
“Collaboration, experiential learning, mentoring, and close student-faculty interactions are central to our pedagogy at Bradley,” Roberts said in the email. “We emphasize real-world learning across the curriculum that ‘engages’ the students in their own educational growth and results in graduating students who are fully prepared to be productive, successful and happy members of society.”
Roberts said the Convergence Center project fits the image of Bradley’s commitment to exemplary student engagement.
“The Convergence Center is the embodiment of the convergence project, which involves interdisciplinary study between engineering and business students and the collaborative work that teams of students will engage in,” Roberts said. “That’s exactly the kind of interactive, hands-on learning that we’re talking about when we’re talking about student engagement.”
Bradley Board of Trustees Chairman Doug Stewart also said the Convergence Center project is critical to students being properly prepared for the work environment.
“What it does is give students more of a real-world experience,” Stewart said. “When [students] go out into the real world, these are the kinds of experiences they will draw upon to be successful.”
