FOLLOWING the University of the Free State’s decision to raise the bar for its admission requirements, we wonder whether it’s just marks that make a university “good”.

If ever you wish to impress your mates/rivals at Stellenbosch, or to correct the lah-dee-dahs up North at Wits, you need only remind them that UCT is the number one university in Africa and the 146th best university in the world.

Of course, you may fall down at the first hurdle should anyone ever challenge you as to why this necessarily makes UCT any better than say, those no-good, rugby-playing skelms over the hill. What, when you get down to it, actually makes this a great university?

Is it the academics? Our fine buildings and facilities? Our food? Anton Taylor? Societies? The Times Higher Education-QS World Rankings (to which we owe the prestigious title above) places a large emphasis on the quality of the research of a university, and the peer reviews related to it – which may suggest that we’re best at looking things up, but is that “greatness”?

Perhaps it is, as the University of the Free State (UFS) seems to believe, a matter of marks. The move to increase the point-requirement by two points was, according to rector Professor Jonathan Jansen, an effort to curb UFS’s drop-out rate, which happens to be the highest in the country. Are degrees, then, the mark of a “great” university?

Is it the amount of sports and extra-curricular activities? Perhaps it’s how close the university is to Tin Roof (or its local equivalent). After all, they do say that these are the best years of your life, and living it up is all part of living a little. Is it a university’s pedigree, as Oxford and Harvard would surely claim?

As unfortunate as it may seem to some students, the whole point of a university (including this one) is to provide you with an education, come hell or high water. You may be happier by the time you walk down Jammie stairs, you may have more friends and squeezes than Paris Hilton, but if you’re not smarter, the university hasn’t been doing its job. Yet marks can’t be the be-all and end-all of a university’s standings.

It should be a mixture of things. A “good” university is one that educates you, teaches you what you need to know, gives you a dress and then shoves you into the wide world beyond. A “better” university would make you care something for the subject matter at hand, and let you indulge in a game of rugby/ice-hockey/beer-pong in addition to your studies.

But a “great” university? Perhaps it is one that allows all of this, in varying degrees. And, as biased as I may be, UCT is certainly one of these. Cut me in half, and once you got the icky bits out of the way you’ll find that the years at this institution have inscribed UCT on my soul. And so I am placed with the Oxfordian who has Jesus College tattooed on all his English servants, or the Japanese workaholic who still fondly remembers those days in Osaka when she still had four hours of sleep a night. Or even, yes, the rugby-player who still cherishes the ball covered in Maties’ signatures sixty years on.

A university may have computer networks capable of taking over the world, playing fields as far as the eye can see, buildings made entirely of ancient ivy and professors so cerebral that they are nothing but giant medullas on legs, but a “great” university?

A truly great university is one that, through every lecture, every tutorial, every midnight essay, reminds you that, given the choice, you would go nowhere else but here.