<p>expect this will be ignored or met with the usual naysaying</p>
<p>Higher</a> education: College is too easy for its own good - latimes.com</p>
<p>Buried in the article was the following:</p>
<p>“In general, traditional arts and science fields (math, science, humanities and the social sciences) tended to be more demanding, and students who majored in those subjects studied more and showed higher gains.”</p>
<p>No surprise here.
As always, the value of a college education depends on what you plan to do with it after you graduate.</p>
<p>Pretty sure the same subject has been discussed previously in other threads. A mixture of grade inflation and joke courses (of the “physics for poets” type) contribute to the ability of some students to slide through school with relatively little learning on the way to a bachelor’s degree.</p>
<p>Of course, there is also the phenomenon that the way medical and law school admissions work encourages pre-med and pre-law students to look for “easy A” courses and repeat material that they already know (from AP) instead of taking more advanced courses.</p>
<p>Good article; but:</p>
<p>“In much of higher education, the problem is in part that undergraduate education is no longer a top priority.”</p>
<p>I suspect this is much more true at large universities than at LACs. I’m not saying no one at Big State U doesn’t care about undergraduate education or that everyone at Ivy Covered College does - but I imagine the tendencies are there.</p>
<p>“College trustees have at the institutional level the fiduciary responsibility to begin holding administrators accountable by asking: How are student learning outcomes and program quality being measured, and what is being done to address areas of concern that have been identified?”</p>
<p>Good luck getting ANYONE in higher education to measure student learning outcomes or assess program quality, except for those professional fields where outside agencies force that to happen. And it’s hard to “address areas of concern” when those areas of concern are very likely associated with the faculty who (a) have tenure as individuals and (b) hold enormous institutional power collectively.</p>
<p>If it’s so easy, why is the graduation rate so low? According to:</p>
<p>[College</a> Enrollments Continue to Climb, While Graduation Rates Hold Steady - Students - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“College Enrollments Continue to Climb, While Graduation Rates Hold Steady”>College Enrollments Continue to Climb, While Graduation Rates Hold Steady)</p>
<p>the 4-year graduation rate is 37%, 5-year 53%, and 6-year 57%.</p>
<p>One reason it’s taking longer to graduate is that cutbacks at the publics make it harder to get the classes necessary to graduate. That was one reason we leaned towards privates for DS.</p>
<p>To answer spurster, because too many families and students think ‘everyone’ should go to college, there are way too many colleges that get to continually exist on govt funds despite dismal graduation rates, or exist by merely taking tuition to anyone willing to pay, and too many highschools no longer graduating students who are ready for college. Look at the CUNY system…all kinds of resources going into remediation just to get students ready for college when in years past, they didn’t have this problem. </p>
<p>There is an overall dumbing down of the system. More tuition, student as customer, designer majors, going to university to get what was really a trade school diploma two decades ago, lame evaluations of professors which has led to grade inflation (since evaluation and being easy are highly corrected), and so on.</p>