Fantasy U

[freeloader]

I am going to hold my tongue for now on the CRT issue and come back to the original purpose of the thread.

I understand the arguments that most of you have made, that different subjects have values in ensuring that college graduates are well rounded and able to think critically in important areas. On some level, I agree with that. That said, that is what the liberal arts portion of the university curriculum at pretty much every college and university already allows students to do. A couple of English classes, a math course or 2, a science course or 2, a couple of other courses in humanities, a couple of courses in the social sciences: that’s pretty much what people are already taking.

By giving students more say over the courses that meet those requirements, you often are making education available to more students. Statistics is awesome. It’s really valuable and, along with things like economics and political science, can be super valuable in understanding the socio-economy of a city, region, or country. Statistics is also hard for a lot of people. If you require it for a college degree, that means that many very smart, very capable people are going to be denied that diploma. The same is really true for any requirement that mandates a specific course.

I also read pretty much all of these posts and have the opposite reaction. My ideal university would be much more like many universities in Europe. If I want to study a particular discipline, why should I spend perhaps 2/3 of my coursework studying things that aren’t particularly relevant to my field of study?

My ideal university would offer a 3-year or a 4-year bachelor’s degree. The four year curriculum would be basically what we have now, with a broad liberal arts base and a major field that composes perhaps 1/4-1/3 of the overall coursework. The 3-year degree would be much more focused on the major subject. A biology student, for instance, would take biology course, of course, along with closely related and relevant courses in other disciplines (math, chemistry, physics, physical anthropology, etc). And before you say, “a person can’t take 15 hours of all science course each semester, it’s too much”, I don’t disagree that this would be really hard. That’s why I think there should be built-in, credit bearing lab work, internships, externships, field placements, etc.  Want to become a doctor?  How about you graduate a year earlier having spent a year working in a research lab (for credit), a year working at a local medical testing facility (for credit), and a year shadowing doctors (for credit)?  To me, that makes far more sense than what we have now. That is why it would never happen.