I find it interesting that a single person’s personal opinion piece, makes people see a “systemic” problem of an entire generation (or at least of everyone attending elite colleges)?
Besides, I must be reading a different article… ?
Seems that student’s opinion was not against rigor - but wondering if rigor sometimes is used as an easy justification for unnecessary/unproductively voluminous workload that defies explanation. They are citing their observation that it just leads to lesser quality being produced, rather than “raising” the outcome – so the exact opposite of the University’s stated goal:
The University justifies their distribution requirements by claiming that “a broad exposure to other kinds of knowledge will enhance students’ ability to discern what questions can be answered through methods native to their own fields and what questions require other methods.” I agree that such exposure is important, but if there are so many major and distribution requirements to the point where the onerous load begins to encroach upon the capacity for students to deliver high quality work in those requirements, it is likely time that we critically re-examine whether every single requirement meaningfully enriches our students.
Seems like a valid question to be posed?
(The answer can always be: “No”. But what happened to “There is no stupid question” ?)
They also make the point, that allowing time to work in quality ECs might result in more-rounded graduates with leadership skills, vs. the practice of imposing rigor for rigor’s sake.
On the other hand, from my personal experience, I’m currently taking a five-course semester, and I find that I’m frequently lowering the quality of work I submit for my five classes so that I can dedicate time to work on my nonprofit consulting project with the World Wildlife Fund. I’ve found that every hour spent on an unnecessary reading assignment or low-value class is an hour that could have been spent on a meaningful extracurricular pursuit.
I read the article as asking whether the ultimate purpose of college is just to impose rigor, or to produce the best possible graduate?
Currently, all students must generally experience a minimum of one semester — or four if they are BSE — where they take five classes.
I don’t think the writer would have like attending university in Canada. 5 courses per semester x all 8 semesters is the standard and for Engineering and some other professional programs they are 6 courses per semester. They also like Princeton usually don’t assign higher credit value to courses that have additional tutorial/seminar or lab sections either so they’re probably of equivalent credit hours. As to there being
more major and distribution requirements than students can handle in productive ways,
while most Canadian universities tend not to have extensive distribution requirements generally allowing more freedom in choosing elective courses than US universities typically do (i.e. gen ed requirements), they do tend to have more required courses in the major on average than the typical US degree. A typical semester would have 3-4 courses in the major with room for 1-2 electives.
Outrageous, to have to have 1 semester of 5 classes and up to 200 pages of reading per week for certain classes. Imagine sending your kid to such a salt mine!
This seems to be more the case in high school, where lots of small assignments are given to ensure that C students can get the 70% correct they need but which are meaningless busywork for A and B students.
In more advanced high school situations, are IB courses and programs harder or more work than they need to be to advance the students’ learning to the level indicated by what colleges give for subject credit for IB scores?
Of course it’s tongue-in-cheek. I’ve expressed myself multiple times on the topic. “Admissions to low acceptance colleges are not an Award For The Best Resume” is something that I’ve written so many times that I should create an acronym for it…
One might think it’s only the average or below average student that produces this “lesser quality” work, and the most talented and hardest working students will have no problem producing high quality work while also taking part in ECs and other activities.
This seems like a student for whom a “gentleman’s C” would have been perfectly adequate in the past, but that no longer provides the path to a prestigious job as might have been the case a couple of generations ago.
The wider question is whether elite institutions should gear their expectations (and top grades) to only the top students, or inflate grades so even “lesser quality” work still gets an A.
Given that the average gpa at many elite schools hovers around a 3.8 I’d suggest we’re already there. From my (admittedly limited) understanding, it’s pretty hard to get a “c” at most elite schools these days.
There will be and always have been people that will do anything and everything to get to the top. The top of what you might ask, a profession, a sport, or music. Some people are just built to have a narrow focus. There aren’t many accidents in people achieving greatness. In reality most people do not want to put in the time and effort to stand out. I know I never did. I probably could have been more ‘successful’ in my career, but I didn’t want to live in an office while my kids were growing up.
One interesting thing in the business world these days is companies are so focused on short-term profits, I mean isn’t that the definition of private equity, but when employees have a short-term view and a capitalist mentality people look down upon them.
I am with @DigitalDad for the most part. I did not think he was complaining about a rigorous curriculum, just about a possibly excessive amount of work and course requirements that may not provide the learning the University believes it does. If the usual course load is 5 classes, one would assume the homework load would reflect that but if 4 is typical, adding a fifth may be challenging.
It is impossible to tell from the opinion piece if he is whining at an appropriate level of work, or pointing out that there is too much “busy work” that does not have much educational value but only adds to stress and possibly to mental health concerns on campuses these days. Clearly, a student opinion piece doesn’t answer that question.
In my engineering firm, we just had a big project that required a lot of late nights and many of the young engineers put in the hours.
I have said multiple times that we should not think of the highest ranked universities as “better”, rather we should think of them as “more academically demanding”. There is no easy way to make a difference in the world, and top universities typically skip the “easy” part, which is exactly what they should do.
I have also said multiple times “you need to want to do it”. If you do not want to work hard, then just do not go to Princeton (or MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Chicago, Caltech, …).
For context, each Princeton course is supposed to be 12 hours of work per week, or 4 credit hours. This implies a normal full time course load of approximately 4 courses per semester.
Princeton does require 36 total courses for engineering majors (theoretically equivalent to 144 credits). For other majors, it is not obvious from the web site how many total courses are required, but 17 courses (equivalent to 68 credits) are expected to be completed by the end of second year.
I’m with @DigitalDad on this one. Some of the comments here make me wonder if folks are reading the same piece I did.
The author isn’t necessarily arguing for less work, or for that matter less rigor, just that rigor itself shouldn’t be used to justify various practices:
“rather than accepting each requirement as a categorical good because of their contribution to rigor, we must evaluate if the tradeoffs to student extracurricular life and investment in other classes is worthwhile. Put simply, Princeton should still push students to take classes in a broad range of disciplines — but rigor should not be the primary justification for doing so.”
Perhaps the inclusion of extracurricular pursuits touched a nerve with some readers? I’d remind them that service and civic engagement are central to Princeton’s mission. It isn’t just the youngs saying that; it’s Princeton as an institution, and most members of the Princeton community (some of them quite old).
I don’t think the author has the pedagogical or subject matter expertise to determine if the level of coursework assigned contributes meaningfully to rigour and subject mastery rather than just an exercise in endurance.
If the author was trying to say what you and DigitalDad believe he’s saying, then these two sentences detracted from that message:
On the one hand, Princeton students are often described by campus activists to be far less engaged with political protests than students at peer institutions, demonstrated — for example — by Princeton’s lackluster Divest protests compared to Yale, Harvard, or Penn.
And:
how can we eliminate all hard things that provide low value for students so that they can instead push themselves in areas — academic or extracurricular — that matter most?
And also this sentence suggested, perhaps unintentionally, that building his resume was a higher priority for the author than pursuing academic challenges (given that consulting is a highly sought after career for many Ivy grads).
I’m frequently lowering the quality of work I submit for my five classes so that I can dedicate time to work on my nonprofit consulting project with the World Wildlife Fund.
