Daily Inspiration Quote by Art Linkletter

Linkletter’s line sells small college not as a brand name but as a lifestyle: porous, busy, a little chaotic in the best way. “Wonderful” is doing soft power here. It’s the language of a genial broadcaster who made a career out of making American institutions feel friendly, accessible, and vaguely wholesome. He’s not arguing; he’s inviting.

The key phrase is “get into everything.” On the surface, it’s practical: fewer students means fewer gatekeepers, more openings on the paper, in the theater department, on the student senate, in a lab. Underneath, it’s a pitch for amateurism as an ethic. At a small college, you’re allowed to be unfinished in public. You can try, fail, switch lanes, and still belong. That’s a subtle rebuke to the prestige model where you specialize early, compete hard, and learn to treat opportunity like a scarce resource.

Context matters: Linkletter came from mid-century American media, an era that romanticized civic participation and saw education as social mobility, not just credentialing. His sentence reflects a time when “well-rounded” wasn’t a punchline; it was a national aspiration. Read now, it lands as both comforting and slightly radical. In a higher-ed economy obsessed with ROI and resume optimization, he’s championing a form of education that’s more like a small town: everyone wears multiple hats, and that’s the point.

The intent isn’t to diminish big universities. It’s to reframe what “value” looks like: not exclusivity, but access to the messy, formative totality of campus life.