The Glade 4.0

College of a waste of time...

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I am not surprised. But how else are they going to spend their time other than being students? There aren't enough jobs for everyone.

I always felt every class outside of the engineering department was retarded easy.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Eh... It's only 45%. And as open ended as the study parameters are (from that article), I question the validity, a bit.

Are they surveying mostly upperclassmen? There are a lot of people that slum their way through the first few years, but won't make it to graduation.

What university was the survey taken at, or was it over several universities?

I'm not saying there aren't flaws with higher education, but I think it is very student and school (and major) dependent.

I honestly can't think of a semester I read fewer than a few thousand pages and wrote fewer than one or two hundred pages for my classes, with the possible exception of my freshman year. And my friends that were in more writing intensive programs wrote a lot more....

And our school was a lower tiered state school in the south.

I think higher ed suffers from much of the same issues as lower ed does, but as students progress through college, I think there is more of a focus on pushing critical thinking than memorization and regurgitation.

Heck, all my major upper division classes were open books, open notes tests- they didn't care what we memorized, but how we could use it.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

I was an engineering major and agree with Corolinth about most other classes being really easy. However, I still spent most of my time not doing work or studying.

...

Wouldn't a single english lit course require far more than a thousand pages of reading??? Aren't classes like that almost a university staple regardless of the field one is going into? (I thought university degrees required a somewhat rounded curriculum.)

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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I'll let Khross field the English question. Though I managed to pass my last English class without ever touching the book.

I typically do more than twenty pages of writing in each course before the four week mark. I can't say any given class normally involves forty pages of reading a week, however.

You are a chemist, right? (Nephyr). Your tests alone (midterm, final, plus any others that occur) will take you over that twenty pages marker for written work in a single semester. There is a reason people think science is hard. Now, recall that we are in the minority on most college campuses throughout the country. Consider another discipline. What would be the point of an open-book final exam in a history class, I wonder? I'm not saying it couldn't be done, or that it shouldn't be possible and that the book automatically constitutes "cheating" - I am not qualified to make that judgment. It is not readily apparent to me, however. If you flip the script, I think it is readily apparent to most history majors why memorizing a physics book doesn't impart the ability to build a bridge.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

It's only surveying students through their sophmore year. So no they aren't reviewing upper classmen, they are basically just reviewing folks at the point where they've most likely just finished up the basics. The last 2 years of college are where most of the heavy lifting for the majority of fields of study are.

I think there is some argument for being disappointed that there isn't more increase even in those 2 years, but it's a gross overstatement to come to Khross' conclusion.

Science is hard, but the grades are curved.

Mine aren't.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Heh, all mine were curved to a bell... 5% to 10% of the class got As, the majority got Cs. All my professors believed in the C is an average grade.

And as to open book history tests, I took a class that was the History of Math- taught in the math dept, but really a pure history class. Our test was open books, open notes, open whatever- and was still quite hard.

If you want critical thinking, you make people talk about the relevance of events, not just when they happened or who was involved.

But yeah, after doing a bit more digging, surveys of Freshmen and Sophomores isn't the best way to find out what college does for people... Sure, a lot of that stuff will be review, especially if you went to a really good high school.

And the writing I was referring to was actually purely papers- most of our labs expected 10-14 reports ~10-20 pages each. And we'd take 2 or 3 a semester.

But yea, I'm in Chemistry, I realize there are other, much easier majors at colleges. The article has the interesting observation that traditional science and liberal arts majors both show large increases over other, newer programs.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

You didn't read the article very carefully.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Every day I interact with people who presumably have four year degrees, but do not have a noticeably larger knowledge base than a high school graduate in the same age bracket.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Actually I didn't read the article at all. I read Khross' quoted section that he appeared to be using as evidence for his claim.

So about 1/3 of college students don't see significant increases. Unfortunate and definately a cause for concern with educators on how to improve their practices.

I still say it's a HUGE leap from those statistics to Khross' stated claim that college is a waste of time.

I've found this to be a tricky thing to actually judge. I find that with many fields of study the education they have received doesn't come into normal conversation much. It does I think speak to the trend in recent years of specialization and ignoring a traditional liberal arts education where one receives a well rounded set of classes that help to do the things the article claims aren't happening. But everyone in this company is just worried about the bottom line. What classes are directly applicable to my major, and to making sure I have a high paying job.

Speaking personally, on pagecount, I know a lot of people in the SFFL class I took weren't actually doing the readings, they were using Sparknotes in order to get the summary without actually reading the text.

For writing, I've done.. at least 30 pages (not counting redrafts) in both Comp 1 and 2, and another 60 in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Lit, and I've just started my third semester.

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Grenade 3 Sports Drink. It's fire in the hole.. Your hole!

Interesting. I don't think I took a single class (with the exception of a math class) that didn't require that much reading.

Maybe my public speaking class.

Being an engineer and math major, quite a few of my classes did not require that much writing.

Meh, I'd argue that college is best suited to teach people some modicum of independance and social skills anyway.

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Sounds like the Glade, if one were to ask me.

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Low blow.

Not quite as low as you might think, Lenas. The majority of course requirements in the first 2 years of college cover material most 8th Graders know and know better than your average high school graduate. The average core curriculum at any major four year university will be something like ...

9 Semester Hours of English (2 Composition, 1 Literature Survey)
6 Semester Hours of Mathematics (College Algebra, Trig or Business Math)
6 Semester Hours of History (Survey of American History, Survey of World History)
8 Semester Hours of Science (Your pick of 2 Biology, Physics, or Geology Courses for non-majors and a 2 Hour Lab)
3 Semester Hours of Communication Arts (Public Speaking being the most common)
6 Semester Hours of Philosophy (Survey of Western Philosophy, Introduction to Logic)
6 Semester Hours of a single Foreign Language
6 Semester Hours of some sort of Elective limited to English, History, or Philosophy
3 Semester Hours in Anthropology, Sociology, or Psychology
6 Semester Hours in Economics and Political Science

That's pretty much the first 2 years of any college degree program; and I'm nearly 100% certain that none of the material covered in any of those courses is new to anyone that has any business being at a university.

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College Algebra is a terminal course for the vast majority of majors. It is probably more common for a student to take college algebra and trigonometry than it is for them to take college algebra and business calculus. (Actual "Calc 1" has a trig prerequisite).

The science requirement for a non-majors is equivalent to 9th grade physical science.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I completely agree with Khross here- it's the point I was trying to make earlier. For any really prepared student, most of the first two years will likely be review- it's not until you start really getting into the major courses that you really start getting new material.

College Algebra + Stat is probably one of the most common math combos- if you go through the Algebra + Trig route, it's probably a major that will require at least a semester of Calc as well.

Intro science courses are basically what was taught in high school- assuming you had a good high school.

A lot of the first two years is spent getting everyone to the same relative place, allowing for inconsistencies in high schools.

It's also what AP tests are for. I did a lot of writing in high school, I was easily able to test out of both semesters of freshman English. The same with math requirements.

The only real difference in the science classes is the labs- and even they can be pretty weak in some areas, if they're required.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

It's not only the rate that universities succeed at, but what they're even accomplishing when they succeed...

I bounce back and forth between the idea at times, but my personal experiences have me leaning more and more towards having more specialized higher education anyway. I know they do in some places, but it tends not to be the norm in America.

Essentially this would involve getting rid of much of the gen ed courses from degree requirements. I think having exposure to all those fields in high school is good and something that should be kept, but it is somewhat repetitive by the time the students are in university. Degree programs should have fairly specific goals, too -- if 99% of the jobs in chemistry require a BS degree in Chemistry, then that is the goal in and of itself. You can still have the, shall we say, less employable degree programs around, but students should be made perfectly well aware at the beginning that grad school should be in their future.

Having a chemist who is well-rounded in western philosophy, Hemingway, and the British Protectorate -> Restoration is nice, and I genuinely do rate it as a positive thing... but I'm not at all surprised to find out that much of the time these courses are definitely a waste. The chemistry student will go on to get his or her BS, which is enough to qualify for the job openings in the field. They get their job and -- for almost every individual case -- college was, at that very point, a success... no matter if they ever really learned how to critically analyze anything.

It sounds a bit backwards, I suppose, when considering the history of education (of which I freely admit I only know broad basics). It's just that college is a means to an end for 99.9% of students, and a lot of these vague notions of college turning out more well-rounded, sharper people does not fit in with that goal. I suppose there's nothing against having the broad degree programs for the rich folk who don't need a degree to carry on the family business or whatever, a la the Grand Tours of old, but the two concepts just seem so out of touch now.

It gets especially fun when I realize that in my personal current situation, gen ed courses are costing me close to $10,000 (not even counting opportunity cost) for this degree I'm earning now... money I may not even have to finish as financial aid tells me the government won't lend me anymore by my last semester. Let me tell you just how much my current economics class is not worth $2500. Oh god the teaching down to a ridiculously low common denominator in that class...

/raises hand

I was told as an undergrad by my professor (the chair of the department) in my "British Novels Before 1900" class that my understanding of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles was so keen and insightful that he wanted me to present them as speaker at a graduate seminar.

I wonder what I would have written had I bothered to read the book.