“...requirements that are merely there to support departments and faculty headcount. . .
You got that one right!
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After taking four semesters of college courses in HS my homeschooled middle applied to the college and declared a major, nursing. Of course the college requires courses in other majors and one of the first courses she took was an English course. The English teacher told her that she was an excellent writer and needed to change her major to English. ``This child was a passable writer but no English major, I know, I taught her. She was being recruited.
Of course there were the required Women’s Studies courses and she was recruited there too. But we were ready for these programs trying to fatten their majors to continue funding at that point.
Be very careful if your child is thinking of changing majors. There is a lot of heavy recruitment going on out there by baby boomer profs who want to keep their jobs.
Universities are all about tenure.
Liberal Arts was part of the Great Western Tradition but funding and enrollment is way down.
In the final analysis, these centers for higher education are businesses, they need to generate wealth for themselves to maintain themselves.
The Big 10 schools and similar all depend on football revenues as well. It’s great fun, college spirit and all that but it’s all about the bottom line - funding.
The idea of churning out a responsible and knowledgeable mass populations from the nation’s universities is a noble cause but one that has been sidelined by Liberals. It’s not what you know, it’s how you’re dealing with it or touchy-feely it.
Let’s face it, we are churing out millions of unprepared hamburger flippers.
What IS saving the nation are foreign students who are eager to learn, work in America and create their own American Dream.
There is also a core group of talented indivduals at every college - they enable us to stay on top of Nobel Prizes and research, the rest of us?