> The best place for undergrads to get a top-notch education is where they have the opportunity to work with or even around top-notch researchers and people at

> The best place for undergrads to get a top-notch education is where they have the opportunity to work with or even around top-notch researchers and people at the top of their fields. Isn´t the fact that colleges are places part of the problem to begin with? In the non-US place where I had my tertiary education, the university was in the major metropolis (it had plenty of green and even a small river crossing it, but it was still in the city). I lived at home with my parents. In the afternoons, I was able to go and attend "scientific initiation" classes at a nearby research institution that didn't issue undergraduate degrees but still had their researchers do some outreach. This at the cost of not taking an internship, which pretty much everyone else did, of course. I'm not saying this is any kind of ideal model, but the research-vocational university isn't the singular model for contact with the research life (another alternative: internships in dedicated research institutions). Of course, by refactoring the university, this... disrobes... the problem of funding research.