<p>I've been thinking about this for a while. The CC community seems to either bash/love Columbia's core curriculum. I'm thinking about applying to Columbia, but the Core is scaring me a little. However, I looked at a few other top colleges, and they also contain somewhat of a core.</p>
<p>So I'm interested to see what everyone else thinks. Is the Columbia Core that much larger than the Cores of other top colleges (HYPS)? Do you guys consider the Core useful, or is it mostly a waste of time? What are the arguments for and against an unstructured environment like Brown?</p>
<p>I wouldn’t think that it is THAT much larger, just more emphasized.</p>
<p>As for usefulness, it really depends on what kind of person you are.
If you are a kind of intellectual and WANT to learn that stuff and find ways to use it, it’ll definitely help. But if your the kind of person who is completely engrossed in one or two subjects AND you don’t care for learning about multiple approaches and ways of thinking (not a bad thing), then it probably won’t help you too much.</p>
<p>Honestly, at places like Brown, you COULD take a Core-Like curriculum and adjust it to fill your own needs. Someone who has already studied TONS of history and learned a lot of languages could readjust his or her “required” curriculum to fit his or her needs and still receive a great, well-rounded education.</p>
<p>The only things anything like Columbia’s Core at HYPS are Yale’s Directed Studies and Stanford’s program on Structured Liberal Education. In fact, those two programs are a lot like Columbia’s Core, but they are voluntary, and only maybe 10% of the freshmen at those colleges do them, whereas at Columbia of course it’s everyone in the College.</p>
<p>A Core Curriculum is one approach – but not the most common one by a longshot – to General Education requirements. The much more common thing for colleges to do is to require that students sample around various broad fields that they won’t be majoring in. Typically, everyone has to take some sort of freshman writing course. Humanities students are required to take some math and science courses, and social sciences; math people have to take some literature, history, psychology, etc. That’s not the same as a Core at all. With a Core, everyone takes the same (or similar) broad interdisciplinary courses, more or less at the same time. The college effectively says, “This is what every educated person ought to know”, and requires that its students learn that.</p>
<p>Harvard may call its system a Core Curriculum, but it’s really not much of one. It’s much more distributional requirements and a few focused interdisciplinary seminars. Chicago has a Core Curriculum, but it has a lot more options than Columbia’s. At Columbia, everyone really studies exactly the same thing at the same time for about a year+ worth of college (spread over two years). The only Core more intrusive than that that I know of is St. John’s, where everyone really spends three years studying the same things.</p>
<p>Obviously, one of the benefits of a Core is that all of the students share a significant common base of knowledge and frame of reference. The downside is that one-size fits-all is hard to do, and pretty much assures that everyone spends time learning something he or she already knows. and also learning things he or she doesn’t give a hoot about. An individual student could probably replicate the Columbia Core for himself at Brown, but he couldn’t replicate the community that a Core creates.</p>
<p>When my D considered Columbia, I knew that the Core would not be things she would enjoy at all. Her interests were far more focused on science and math and ultimately she chose not to apply to Columbia for reasons unrelated to the Core. My D will be much happier with the distributional requirements at H. One of her good friends, however, who will be attending Yale, would have loved the Core classes, so I think you should look at the topics and see if they are ones you would like to take.</p>
<p>^ This attitude is very common, but I don’t understand it at all. My guess is that 99% of the students at Brown (or higher), and 100% of the advisers, agree with the “sampling different foods” idea. If you picked 10 Harvard students and 10 Brown students at random, and looked at their schedules (having excluded tip-off courses), you would have a hard time figuring out just from the courses who was going to the college with distribution requirements and who wasn’t.</p>
<p>The only thing really different between Brown’s and Harvard’s general education philosophy is that Brown’s Big Principle is that it will admit great students and trust them, while Harvard’s Big Principle seems that its faculty will kick, bite, and scam one another for the upper hand in designing a set of minimum requirements because they don’t trust their own students’ ability to make good educational choices. As between the two, Brown’s attitude seems way healthier to me. That doesn’t mean Brown is the “better” university, just that for all its greatness Harvard seems to be a little petty towards its students and (surprise, surprise) a little ego-trippy at the faculty level. (And not just Harvard, of course.)</p>
<p>But teenage students look at Brown and confuse its lack of requirements with a call to anarchy and/or slackerdom. Really, it isn’t. A university doesn’t have to turn every good idea into a requirement or mandate just to show that it thinks the idea is good.</p>
<p>I guess it comes down to personal preference in the end. I can see where you’re coming from. Brown puts enough trust in the students that they will make the right choice versus Harvard (and, for that matter, most other universities) requiring students to take a certain number of courses. </p>
<p>At the same time, students are less likely to diverge their interests in various courses if they don’t have to take them. I would guess that Brown picks its’ class based on those factors.</p>
<p>At a Columbia info session in April, one of the first statements made by the Admissions Officer leading the session was “don’t apply here unless you LOVE to read and write!” (verbatim). She then went on to explain the nature of the Core. My daughter, then and there, decided not to apply (even though I imagined MYSELF at Columbia because I loved the Core concept). I think that’s the essence of the Core - a lot of liberal arts reading, a book a week on average, with some sort of writing such as an essay associated with each book. Most kids don’t do this in high school and look at college as a way to focus more on their own interests, so a very structured curriculum is less appealing.</p>
<p>i applied and was accepted to columbia for 2014… i flip-flopped throughout the entire process between loving and hating the core. some days i was praising it as such a wonderful way to expand your horizons (and, for a science/math phobic person like me, to be forced to explore new things, which is valuable) and foster unity within the freshman class and take advantage of the opportunities in nyc, and get an incredibly well rounded education … then other days i was like, “omg, i really don’t even WANT to study all these things, i want to be able to go in and start developing focus into what i love. and it’s going to be so time consuming and stressful!”</p>
<p>haha, i think there are pros and cons, it’s about whatever works for you :)</p>
<p>The Columbia’s CORE is still heavily centered on the literary, philosophical, arts, musical excellence of western or European civilization (apart from a few non-western cultures seminars). This is great for non-western, Asian students like myself. We benefit by learning what makes the west tick, their mindset, motivations, etc. However, in the gradual shifting of the global economic world order to Asia, it may desirable to also re-balance the CORE somewhat. Otherwise, it is not impossible that you end up with an elite intelligentsia steeped in the Greek and Latin classics, but think that Singapore is a city in China.</p>