Posted on 09/16/2009 6:33:31 AM PDT by reaganaut1
...
Harvard is a venerable institution with “a lot of arcane traditions and rituals,” he acknowledged. But in the business of education, Harvard is not a very conservative or traditional place — and in fact has taken dramatic steps over the years “to change the face of education,” said Menand.
Behind those steps were a string of Harvard presidents, he explained, beginning with Charles William Eliot, under whose tenure (1869-1909) the institution was transformed from an antebellum college to a modern research university.
For one, said Menand, Eliot had the “revolutionary idea” that a bachelor’s degree should be required for entrance into professional schools, such as for law and medicine.
In the 19th century, young men often skipped college and went directly to professional schools, at which there were no admission requirements and no exams. At one time, said Menand, half of Harvard’s law students and three-quarters of its medical students had never attended college.
So requiring a bachelor’s degree for admission to higher study, he said, had a double benefit: It improved the quality of graduating doctors and lawyers, and it saved colleges by building in an audience for what they offered. Eliot believed “that colleges be nonutilitarian,” said Menand. “First you are liberalized, then you are professionalized.”
(Excerpt) Read more at news.harvard.edu ...
Student who have the necessary academic background (math, physics, chemistry, biology) should be allowed to enter medical school without spending 4 years to get a B.A. There are a few 6-year medical programs (that shave 2 years from the usual 4+4 path), but they are not the norm.
Requiring a bachelor’s degree just lets the institutions stick a siphon in your wallet: “Sorry, you need a degree to apply to that school - no degree? Weeeelllll, we just happen to have a nice selection riiiight here!”
A racket. My bachelor’s degree had nothing to do with how well I did on the LSAT. The LSAT didn’t have anything to do with how well I did in law school. Law school had very little to do with how well I did on the bar exam. And the bar exam had nothing to do with how good a lawyer I became.
Great system, hunh?
Colonel, USAFR
Student who have the necessary academic background (math, physics, chemistry, biology) should be allowed to enter medical school without spending 4 years to get a B.A.
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A lot of medical school could be done on line, with Sylvan Center testing, and regularly scheduled meetings of students for labs and recitations.
I’m sure my pre-med friends (I was a simple BA) would be thrilled to hear this. Of course, they are all in their early 50s now, so not much good to them.
Those guys took very few courses outside the math and sciences as undergrads. It was all chem and bio.
Is the suggestion really that those courses are unnecessary, and they would pick up all that background info elsewhere?
An interesting discussion, but I think I’d prefer my various docs to have the undergrad degree first. But if you want your doc to get his info from a Sylvan Learning Center, that would be your perogative. I’ve had several kids get additional tutoring from Sylvan in the maths and sciences. No thanks.
About 300 years ago, when I was freshman in college, I started out as a Journalism major. For that program you were designated “PRJ” or pre-journalism for 2 years, then were accepted into the program and completed the major in the remaining 2 years of the 4-year undergraduate program. I became somewhat disappointed in the program in my sophomore year and changed my major to economics, and really have never looked back on the decision to pursue something other than journalism.
While pursuing advanced degrees in business and a law degree - I formed the opinion that a field like journalism, more so than any other field, should require an undergraduate degree before entry. Those who populate our media today are profoundly and consistently ignorant of science, economics, accounting, law, and so many other areas of knowledge that it makes your head spin to read what passes for newspaper reporting or what appears on television as “journalism.” I think that a professional writer or journalist should demonstrate some command of a discipline (science, engineering, statistics, math, literature, biochemistry, etc.), and then learn to write for a particular media. What we have today are so many “journalists” who can swallow whole hog some outrageous claim about a new source of “green” energy or hydrogen powered autos, and then regurgitate it whole in print or on television - because they do not know the term “thermodynamics”, much less understand why it makes many of the energy related claims they are confronted with - fraudulent or impossible on their face.
I generally agree that academia has padded their business with the requirement that all professional programs build on a bachelor’s degree - but I think journalism is an exception. It is palpable that they need help, in the form of more training and better rigor in terms of analytical and interpretive skills.
Yet..What about people like Rush Limbaugh? He isn't a college graduate. He is an autodidact. And...have you read the “Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin”?
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