It may not surprise some that a quality education has the power to provide, to those who seek it, the opportunity for personal and professional transformation. It can be said that a society that encourages higher education is more likely to produce a population of public-spirited and purposeful individuals than a society that does not. In an article titled “What Can College Mean? – Lessons from the Bard Prison Institute, author Ellen Condiffe Lagemann argues for the importance of a liberal arts education but also presents the case that a quality education in the United States is not available to everyone. Lagemann is a professional in the field of education. Among other prestigious honors, he is a senior fellow at the Bard Prison Initiative or BPI, a liberal arts college program offered to convicted felons in prison in upstate New York. The BPI program boasts a near 100% completion rate (excluding those who have been transferred or released from prison) with approximately 250 students enrolled at the time of this article. Lageman attributes this success to the program's unique design, which closely mirrors the program at Bard College in Annandale on the Hudson. Compared to other universities, there are three areas in which BPI believes it excels. The first is their admissions process. Admissions counselors are trained to evaluate applicants based on their maximum learning potential rather than their past academic experience. By seeking candidate qualities such as drive, curiosity, ambition and self-expression, BPI can ensure that its students are selected fairly and are able to reach their maximum academic potential in a rigorous yet supportive learning environment. ... half of the paper ... it took too much work for the reader to get to this point. This article would have been more compelling if it had devoted more attention to examining the relationship between U.S. policy and the current state of our prison population through the lens of education, using the importance of the BPI and statistics as support, rather than skipping over back and forth between the general data comments on the education, success, and attributes of the BPI program. Furthermore, the lack of opposing viewpoints diminishes the validity of Lagemann's argument. There should have been more exploration into why we should provide funding to criminals when there are needy law-abiding citizens to add more depth and credibility to an otherwise one-dimensional article. In conclusion, I feel that Lagemann went off on some unnecessary tangents that risked losing his audience along the way.