BYU boasts smart, motivated students

When Jared Bruton was 4, the family TV broke and his parents couldn't afford a new one. For entertainment, the Bruton kids relied on books and Legos, inspiring a love of reading and building that has served them well.
    Now a senior at Duchesne High School, Jared has excelled in all aspects of student life. He scored a perfect 36 on the ACT and earned a 4.0 grade point average while performing double duty on the football team's offensive line and defense backfield, dominating hurdle events in track, volunteering hundreds of hours and playing key roles in "Oklahoma!" and other school musicals.
    This dream student could get into the nation's most selective universities, but his sights are set closer to home. Although Bruton has an application pending at Harvard University, he already has decided to attend Brigham Young University, following his older siblings and parents.
    "I love the fact that BYU requires students to be involved with community service, and that they teach students to give back to those around them," said Bruton, who intends to major in business and mechanical engineering. "Also, I love the way that they integrate religion into the daily university life."
    Bruton's story illustrates an aspect of BYU, which celebrates its 133rd commencement at 4 p.m. today, that any institution would envy. The school, operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, enjoys one of nation's highest "yields," tying with Harvard in the percentage of admitted students who actually enroll - about 79 percent in 2006. The University of Utah enrolls, by comparison, about 50 percent of its admissions, and the national average is 47 percent.
    "BYU's yield speaks to a level of desirability. That could draw from a number of factors, such as price, religious orientation and reputation, which goes far beyond selectivity," said David Hawkins of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. "The people who apply to BYU are motivated to go there. It is a good thing for a college to have a high yield. It means students know what they're getting when they apply there."
    Some critics deride what they see as BYU's lack of diversity and intolerance of views that challenge Mormon doctrine. Some scholars have faced excommunication after exercising what many observers describe as legitimate and healthy academic freedom. But by any measure, BYU's rigorous academics prepare undergraduates for success.
    Its graduation rate approaches 80 percent and its admissions standards are among the highest in the Mountain West, so that incoming freshman now average a 28 on the ACT and a 3.6 GPA, spokesman Michael Smart said. BYU ranks among the top 10 universities whose grads later earn doctorates, 2,116 between 1995 and 2004.
    "Most high achievers would apply to five colleges to see where they get in," Smart said. "Kids who go to BYU really want to go here. Lots of our top scholars apply only to BYU."
    That was the case with freshman Marie Chilton of Richland, Wash., and Landon Coggins of Chicago. Both graduated near the top of their high school classes with perfect GPAs and ACT scores in the mid-30s, placing them in the top 1 percentile of the nation academically. BYU's religious environment and honor code were important draws, but it also has "a good social aspect. We share the same religious values," said Coggins, who leaves on a church mission to Peru this summer. "My study habits got better. The honor code has annoying restrictions, but they trust the students."
    Like the Bruton family, Chilton and Coggins' families are filled with BYU alumni. BYU students may all hew to the same faith, but they harbor a broad range of religious views, the students said.
    "There is an openness because we all accept each other. We all know what it's like to have people not respect our beliefs," Chilton said. "I like learning about religion in an academic setting. It's spiritual, but it's also intellectual."
    Brian Woodfield, a BYU chemistry professor, recently convinced a top Nevada high school senior to forgo Berkeley to study chemistry at BYU, where he will be able to engage in research and graduate with minimal debt. BYU tuition is a bargain at about $4,000, and twice that for students outside the Mormon fold, whose tithing covers 70 percent of BYU's operating expenses.
    "His initial impression was that BYU was a lower-caliber school. We don't have Nobel prize winners but we give access to professors and ability to work in labs," said Woodfield, a BYU alumnus who did his graduate work at Berkeley. "I hire students as freshmen. In our lab I'll have five to 15 undergraduates working on various projects, and they become authors."
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    * BRIAN MAFFLY can be contacted at bmaffly@sltrib. com or 801-257-8605.