All of us in Connecticut should be proud of the rising prestige of our University of Connecticut, originally founded as an agricultural college in Storrs in 1881. The 2014 edition of “Best Colleges,” published by U.S. News & World Report, ranks UConn as the 57th best national university in the country, obviously behind such eminences such as Princeton, Harvard and Yale, but ahead of Syracuse, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Rutgers, etc.
The significant improvement is due in large part to the considerable generosity of the state, in showering the university with millions of dollars of grants. In the past few years, that support has steadily declined, from covering 50 percent of UConn’s needs in fiscal 1991 to 27.5 percent in 2013.
