Posted on 04/07/2013 9:27:57 AM PDT by grundle
I recently came upon the July issue of Life magazine, which reproduces, with her permission and comment, the entire four-year academic transcript of Brooke Shields
The record itself reflects nothing but credit on the young lady. She got all A's and B's. None of the criticism that follows is directed at her
What caught my attention was the totality of her program - that is, what it takes to get a Princeton degree these days.
She took four courses in French language and five in French literature. She took eight courses in drama-related subjects: three in acting, three in cinema analysis, one in dance, one in contemporary English drama. These accounted for 59 percent of her classroom hours.
She took three semesters of ceramics (10 percent).
She took three courses in psychology - introduction to, abnormal and ''Theories of Psychotherapy'' (10 percent).
She had two other English courses - ''Women and the Novel'' and ''Victorian Children's Literature'' (7 percent).
The other courses, one semester each, were ''Philosophy and the Modern Mind,'' ''Comparative Family Systems'' (sociology), ''The Self in World Religions'' and ''History of Earth and Life'' (geology).
If that adds up to a liberal arts education from a place like Princeton, there is no longer any danger that our society will ever suffer from elitism in any form.
That education apparently contained no courses in classical studies (history, philosophy, literature of the ancient world), medieval history, modern history or American history; no hard science (physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy) requiring any kind of lab; no math; no anthropology; no economics; no political science or government; no basic sociology; no world literature; no American literature; no geography; not even computer literacy.
That's no fault of hers; by my lights, she got cheated.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Absolutely true. We now have 2-3 generations of the most expensive, ill equipped, undereducated elites in leadership positions for now and the foreseeable future. We are pretty much doomed.
I think you under-appreciate how much engineering has changed in 100 years.
Back then, there might have been more classics and such in an engineering school, but there is a tremendous increase in the knowledge packed into a BS in engineering, much less a MS, in the last 100 years.
100 years ago, EE’s didn’t have to take any coursework in semiconductor physics. MechE’s didn’t have anywhere near the knowledge in their materials classes we see today, and so on.
Unlike the “liberal” arts programs, engineering hasn’t become soft and cushy. There’s a change in the material in the programs, mostly because we have created so much new technology in the last 100 years.
Another example: 100 years ago, we barely had vacuum tubes. We had no such thing as op-amps. Had a circuits course that was mostly op-amps and their applications in control systems and filters. Not exactly a cake-walk, and quoting from said class didn’t exactly impress girls in the campus bar, either. Engineers of 100 years ago would probably wash out of today’s engineering programs. They weren’t adapted to the speed of change in the fields... life was much simpler back then.
No college degree: Rush Limbaugh, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, plus most Hollywood nitwits. One conservative, the rest liberals.
Five classes in French lit. Conceivably, she read some comparable authors. That might also count for the "world literature" Koppett says she didn't take. Also, we don't know what high school AP classes she might have taken.
Well, I figure everyone ought to read Racine and Moliere, and some Victor Hugo. But even the French, German, and Italians get taught Shakespeare in school, or at least they used to.
It’s likely that Ms. Shields (and many other Princeton and other Ivy League undergraduates) fulfilled many of their distribution requirements with AP credits or college credits otherwise earned in high school.
The courses listed on my daughter’s Mount Holyoke transcript shows no evidence of the college’s language, freshman comp or math requirements — she took enough college level Russian, a college level writing course and AP calc (getting a high enough score on the AP exam) while in high school to fulfill them before she was even admitted.
I had thought about that. Congrats to your daughter. Wow, Russian, that's quite an achievement.
We did a similar thing call Dual Credit, our son took all his high school credits at the community college, actually never set foot in a high school, and received his AA and High School Diploma at the same time.
I know they have more and more programs for kids to get a leg up on their college work. The Dual Credit program was so popular that now they have High Schools on the community college campuses, they call them Collegiate High Schools, plus we have the IB programs and AP classes (my husband and I both wish they would have had similar programs back in our day.)
So on my son's college transcript from his University where he received his BA, you wouldn't see a lot of math, even though he took lots of math.
Also there is the possibility that Ms. Shields CLEPed her general requirements. I knew someone who ClEPed out of 75% of her General Requirements.
Might have gotten at some of these in a history course. I TA’d western civ 1 & 2 in grad school and the students read many classic authors.
But no, not with any depth.
I think you under-appreciate how much engineering has changed in 100 years.I'm a licensed professional engineer with a master's degree in my field. I probably wouldn't have even been admitted to engineering school 100 years ago. 14 posted on 04/07/2013 10:27:44 AM PDT by Alberta's Child
That is an understatement. To become a PE 100 years ago you probably would not even attend college at all. There are two ways to qualify to take Part A of the PE exam in NY - get a degree from an accredited engineering school, or work under a PE for 5 (I think it was) years. To qualify to take Part B of the PE exam, a degree wouldn’t matter - you had to have the engineering experience. So you see, you could become a PE now (or at least 30 years ago when I considered it) without going to engineering school at all. But the only way to get a PE without the engineering experience would be to become a professor in an accredited engineering school.That traces back to the fact that when MIT was founded, engineering was considered a discipline of experience rather than study, and the idea of an engineering school was a controversial novelty. That changed after WWII, only because of things like radar - new technologies which no amount of experience would be likely to make you competent in. With radar in particular, the engineers moaned among themselves that they were reduced to plumbers for the scientists who had the math background to be able to deal with the behavior of microwaves. Professional engineers came away from that experience with a “never again” determination - and engineering school, with a heavy theoretical and mathematical course load, became the standard way to become an engineer.
That information came from
Up the Infinite Corridor: MIT and the Technical Imagination by Fred Hapgood (Feb 1994)You would find it fascinating.
It’s amazing to me how incapable these folks are not only of writing coherent English, but of doing any critical thinking at all.
Great information there. I know the requirements for licensure in many states have changed considerably over the years. In my state, it’s very difficult to have your application for the exams accepted without a degree at an accredited school.
Well, she was apparently able to obtain employment post-graduation.
I shouldn’t wonder that that is now the case (but of course I was writing about the past, the discussion having started with a comment about engineering education circa 1910). A friend of mine decided to go for his PE, but he had graduated from a school which wasn’t accredited, so he had to go the “experience” route in order to even start the application process. I think that would have been about 1990 or so . . . my, how time flies! I haven’t done a lick of engineering in this century!Wikipedia says that MIT was founded during the 1860s, but my recollection from the book I cited is that the actual engineering curriculum there came later - more in the era of the founding of my school, Drexel Institute of Technology (now Drexel University) in the 1890s, as I recall. IIRC it was founded independently of MIT and later incorporated into it - something like that.
The “infinite” corridor in the title of that book refers to a corridor in a building at MIT which only seems infinite.
Your young engineers are not alone.
Very few college students today can compose a coherent (and complete) sentence -- much less a paragraph. And that includes the B-schoolers, the J-schoolers...even the English majors.
And the fault isn't the college's; they're graduating from high school without any language skills or knowledge, whatsoever. They can't even spell!
King Bush I, King Bush II, Bubba and Mrs. Clinton.
OK. Thanks.
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