The difference that matters: quality over scarcity!

Friday, September 26, 2025

Dedicated students, distinguished colleagues and dear friends,

Happy Friday!

The ritual is on! From near and far, prospective students, along with their parents, are visiting our campus, as they are many other campuses. They are on a quest to identify the one university that will fulfill their dreams of a great college education and experience with the best return on investment (ROI) of their time and money. If the opportunity arises, I always say “hello” and welcome them to our campus. I am always so tempted to tell them, “your search has ended, you are at the right place!” 

I don’t say that, but I will, however, state it here: “your search is over; you are at the right place.” The crazy game of the never-ending search and desire to “get in” at schools with the highest rejection rates of applications should come to a logical end by analyzing what it is that one expects a university to offer. How about a solid education with the highest prospects of employment after graduation? Or the skills to analyze the contemporary issues of our time and then adapt and adjust them to contribute to one’s profession, community and society? 

I have the answer — at least according to the survey results of hundreds of thousands of university freshmen and seniors who described how engaged they actually are with their professors, friends and the university environment. Essentially, the question was, “what are you gaining from college?”

The (not so) surprising result is that selectivity rates of elite universities had very little to do with valuable gains on 18 different engagement measures! In other words, if your measure of success is engagement, learning and high prospects of gainful employment, then we must delineate between scarcity and quality and end the treacherous game of admission to schools with high rejection rates. “Being selective, in other words, doesn’t automatically translate to providing a more engaging experience for students,” writes Jeffrey Selingo in a recent New York Times article.

Here at S&T, we offer over 100 programs and are nationally ranked in the top 10 for return on investment of our students and their parents. Our graduates command the highest starting salaries of any university in our state and ninth-highest starting salary in the nation. Yet we admit most of our applicants and provide ample support for our students to successfully complete their rigorous curricula.

As a result, year after year and semester after semester after semester, we host a record number of national and international corporations during our Career Fair, where thousands of our students interview and find internship and co-op opportunities during their years here, and full-time career opportunities after graduation. The average starting salaries? $74,048, $87,217 and $97,369, for bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. graduates, respectively. These starting salaries are by far the highest in the state and one of the highest in the nation. 

Of course, this is not new for us here at S&T. For over 150 years, S&T, from its original charter as Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy, to University of Missouri-Rolla, to now Missouri University of Science and Technology, has been a crown jewel of American engineering and science education. All along, our graduates have provided critical contributions to critical challenges of their time. Among other professions, many of our innovative and inventive graduates have become entrepreneurs, engineers, business executives, inventors, astronauts and educators, among many other professions.

To our would-be new Miners of 2026, I say, your search is over; you are at the right place, right here at Missouri S&T, where quality surpasses scarcity every day.

Warmly,

-Mo.

Share your thoughts!

Read previous Friday morning messages.

Check out the latest news from S&T:

Mohammad Dehghani, PhD
Chancellor
mo@mst.edu | 573-341-4116

206 Parker Hall, 300 West 13th Street, Rolla, MO 65409-0910
chancellor.mst.edu