Posted on 11/24/2010 6:52:07 AM PST by La Lydia
BALTIMORE - Johns Hopkins University is America's premier research institution. Yet a student could complete a bachelor's degree here without ever taking a course in science. Or math. Or history. Or English. Students at Johns Hopkins - and many other prestigious colleges - choose classes the way a diner patron assembles a meal, selecting items from a vast menu. Broad distribution requirements ensure that students explore the academic universe outside their majors. But no one is required to study any particular field, let alone take a specific course. Shakespeare, Plato, Euclid - all are on the menu; none is required.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a Washington-based advocacy group, handed out F grades in August to Hopkins and many of its peers, inviting debate on a basic question: What, if anything, should America's college students be required to learn?
The group faulted the schools, including Yale, Brown, Cornell, Amherst and the University of California at Berkeley, for failing to require students to take courses in more than one of seven core academic subjects: math, science, history, economics, foreign language, literature and composition.
"At Stanford, you can fulfill the American cultures requirement by taking a class on a Japanese drum," said Anne Neal, president of the trustees group.
"We're certainly not saying that Harvard or Hopkins or Yale are not good schools, or that their graduates are not smart kids," said Neal, who attended Harvard and Harvard Law. "What we're saying is that those schools don't do a good job at providing their students with a coherent core."...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
This explains quite a lot.
This has been going on for a long time, even in the technical disciplines. Back in the heyday of Silicon Valley, I moved there from the midwest. The managers I interviewed with all told me “We like people from Midwest and East Coast colleges because we have no guarantee what the California graduates know, and don’t have time to try and figure it out.”
It’s kind of like health insurance. Since no one involved in the process is actually paying cash, who cares if an aspirin is $15 ? Since they wont even talk to parents about grades or courses as the students are “adults” - there’s no steady hand to advise on taking the econ class over the anthroplogy. Sure, if your kids respect you and you are paying, they’ll discuss it with you. But what fraction of the student body is that ?
Meanwhile, I am pretty certain that all of these colleges have multicultural requirements so that the students know how to “think correctly”.
Colleges are required to accept un-qualified students to meet racial quotas. I assume they also are or feel that they are required to graduate them also.
Ignorance in; ignorance out.
“We’re certainly not saying that Harvard or Hopkins or Yale are not good schools, or that their graduates are not smart kids,” said Neal, who attended Harvard and Harvard Law. “What we’re saying is that those schools don’t do a good job at providing their students with a coherent core.”...
This is why I strongly feel that there has to be a system of standardized ‘exit exams’ given to all graduates to assess their knowledge. We have developed a system of educational ‘royalty’ with certain universities enshrouded in a mantle of superiority, without any proof that they deserve it.
I have no sympathy for the colleges. I have a history degree, and it was very possible to obtain the degree without taking any history courses.
My faculty was merged with ‘women’s studies’, courses for which counted as history.
Then the higher ups killed the entire program, but kept women’s studies. Really, universities don’t care about rigor at all.
What a complete bunch of self-loathing wankers.
When did that happen?
For Bio-Medical research, maybe one of the top three.
For the Physical Sciences and Engineering, maybe one of the top fifteen.
America's premier research institutes haven't changed in a long time...
Harvard, MIT, Stanford, UCBerkeley, Cal Tech.....and the rest of the usual suspects.
you forgot “no show”.
Georgia Tech is one of the top research universities especially in Engineering disciplines and I do know they still require a vigorous core studies requirement in Math, Science, English, History, etc.
“At Stanford, you can fulfill the American cultures requirement by taking a class on a Japanese drum,”
Could the course be anything like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FtTaDNsyCY
Then let me say it. They are schools living on their reputations.
And their is also this ray of light:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5723a3.htm
While it is true that the schools named here do not have core curricula, it does have distribution requirements that mandate taking courses in areas outside of one’s own discipline. So it’s not quite true to say that one could graduate “without ever taking a course in science. Or math. Or history. Or English.” It does mean that the student is allowed to choose what classes he takes in science or math or history to satisfy the requirement that he have so many science, math, or humanities credits, rather than having the entire student body taking the same core classes.
A core curriculum is a good thing when chosen carefully to give students a broad knowledge of our cultural heritage. But the lack of a core curriculum can also give students the time (and thus the opportunity) to focus on their major field of study.
Yes.
Georgia Tech is probably the number one USA school for industrial engineering research in robotics and machine tools and textiles.
(Note: I use quotation marks to draw attention to the specialties that are populated with idiots for the most part.)
And that’s becoming formalized by policies adopted in more and more Midwestern and Southern schools—to such a blatant extent that it likely will endanger their tax-exempt status. And it’s sad that the current crop of “professional” scholars are trashing the academy. They take for granted that people will always want to come in the door...and that employers (the enemy) will prefer college graduates even as degrees are becoming ideological certificates. It certainly has been sad to witness the process at my alma mater—and just beginning at the college where my wife teaches. The dynamics of the Carrie Nattion CS (community service) faculty mirror the forces driving policy on the Left that is trying to put us all in-harness mentally, physically and financially: politics of control.
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