<p>"One of my students enrolled in a 3rd tier Catholic uni "
-we compare apples to oranges, aka state schools to privates. yes, some privates offerring vey good Merit awards, but you really need to know which ones (I know Case is one of them). However, most do not. Again, it has to be a combo of top HS stats/right school/top college stats to get covered at 100% or close. And, again, many parents are paying out of paychecks, if they do not believe in loans.</p>
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<p>Iām sure some pre-meds challenge themselves as undergraduates, and bravo for them. But the required courses are not all that rigorous.</p>
<p>As an engineer I have to say to ācat isā -> only four classes and no labs. wow easy semester! BTW is that more than 12 hours? And can you get done in 4 years on that program? I mean, hey, I understand if you have to work and that is all you can balance, just keep at the goal. But existnetialism! Give me a freaking break! I have no problem with people taking 5 years to graduate espiecally if they are putting themselves through with little to no help from mom and dad. No problem with that at all, but how exactly is this course of study going help you pay off those student loans. What is your personal business plan?</p>
<p>At a time I was 30, I was not even in IT, I was in engineering. I got my last job (#9) because of my degrees, all other stuff I had (experience, awesome local references, I had references at every place I applied, somebody already knew me there, since I have worked in many places). My resume stood out because of my degrees. At least I was told that many times. I had many interviews inmy life. You got to go to many to get a job. I got my first IT job after CC though, but I had my engineering degrees and experience by then.</p>
<p>annasdad,
maybe, but those with non-rigorous classes, do they get accepted? the goal is to get accepted and D. had some highly educated people in her Med. School class, including PhD from Hrvard, several lawers, many with Master in scienceā¦my D. has BS and she is 22, she had to find the way to be competitive enough in this type of crowd. her classmates were in the same boat.</p>
<p>Thereās no way to assess ārigorā just from a courseās name. </p>
<p>When I took Marketing 101, I had to develop a complete marketing plan, and as I recall my plan ran 20+ pages; and the final exam was of the form āHereās the situation; what would you do about it, and why?ā When my friendās daughter took Marketing 101, the grade was based on a midterm and a final, both multiple-guess with questions right out of the textbook. My Business Law midterm and final were 100% case studies (that we hadnāt seen before); friendās Dās tests were multiple-choice and true-and-false questions.</p>
<p>Almost any course can be dumbed down; and any course can be taught with rigorous requirements.</p>
<p>EDIT: Iām not holding my education up as an exemplar; I also had some courses that were not especially rigorous.</p>
<p>āwe compare apples to oranges, aka state schools to privates. yes, some privates offerring vey good Merit awards . . . . However, most do not. Again, it has to be a combo of top HS stats/right school/top college stats to get covered at 100% or close. And, again, many parents are paying out of paychecks, if they do not believe in loans.ā</p>
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<li><p>My point is that she chose to live at home in favor of the more expensive, traditional residential experience.</p></li>
<li><p>She did not get a full-boat (COA) award or even a fulll-tuition award (I said diff b/w award and tuition was about $7K; no expense for room/board b/c she was living at home).</p></li>
<li><p>I mentioned her merit $$ b/c it was a private school where tuition was higher than local public schools. Tuition at a SUNY or CUNY school would have been under $6K; thus, LESS EXPENSIVE than the private tution after scholarship/finaid were applied.</p></li>
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<p>Iāll yield to people who know what theyāre talking about. I was just repeating the conventional wisdom that obtains hereabouts at CC, the fount of all knowledge of things collegiate.</p>
<p>One thing for sure, there is no way to compare Business classes to engineering/pre-med. Look who is in Greek. My Ds sorority had 2 pre-meds and many buisness majors. not to put anybody down, but I have both engineering and 3 degrees in business, Associate, BS and MBA. You absolutely cannot compare, not any close. I took all my college classes while working full time and having family.</p>
<p>^Haā¦you want rigorousā¦try getting an Econ degree at the University of Chicago, where there were graduate students in every one of my classes after 2nd year.</p>
<p>OK, I wonāt argue rigor. A lot of it has to do with aptitude as well and itās not really relevant to the discussion anyway.</p>
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<p>Agree, at least as far as engineering is concerned, or the physical sciences (Iāll still disagree with you on pre-med). But it is possible to have a rigorous business curriculum (and mine was, for the most part; in fact, my undergrad program was more rigorous than my MBA program, and both were at the same school). Unfortunately, at many schools, business majors are the lowest common denominator - an opinion backed up by the statistics in āAcademically Adrift,ā which show business majors at the bottom of the critical thinking scale and liberal arts majors (especially science and math) at the top.</p>
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<p>Hmm. In my fraternity, it was about 50/50, engineers and non-engineers. Of course, that was nearly a half century ago, and things may have changed. (What hasnāt changed, however, at least from observations hereabouts, are the arguments in the endless my-major-is-better-than-yours discussions!)</p>
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<p>I go to Ohio State, and Iām shocked. Four years at OSU doesnāt even cost 100,000 (more like 80k IF you are living on campus). And if you choose to not live on campus, that cuts it down by 20k, so it is more like 60k for four years, maybe even less.</p>
<p>May I ask what did this student major in? Iām a Nursing major, and my starting salary at the medical center is at least 23-25 dollars/hour.</p>
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<p>Pre-med required courses do have a lot of time consuming labs, so even if they are intellectually not that difficult (often, easier chemistry, physics, and math courses are available compared to those for students majoring in those subjects). Students often feel that they must study heavily to get a minimum-acceptable-for-medical-school grade of A- or higher in a class with a grading curve full of other pre-meds seeking the same A- or higher grades. So that may result in those courses being seen as āhardā, at least in terms of workload, even if they may not be the most intellectually difficult courses at the school.</p>
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<p>The percentage of students who are business majors does seem to increase as the admissions selectivity of the four year school goes down.</p>
<p>What an unnecessarily sensationalistic article name.</p>
<p>She is āTrapped WITH a $50,000 Degree in a Low-Paying Jobā, not āTrapped BY a $50,000 Degree in a Low-Paying Job.ā</p>
<p>Itās not like she would have gotten a better job without that degree. Perhaps she would have been better off with a different degree or with entering the job market a couple of years earlier, but her degree isnāt inherently harmful.</p>
<p>When DS was getting a comp sci/EE degree, at least the courses he took were relevant, and there werenāt too many courses in areas that he didnāt care for that he had to take to meet the degree requirements. </p>
<p>DD1 is in a pre-med track at a top 20 univ that we sent her to before we knew any better. When she came for Thanksgiving, we were horrified to see her putting together a project similar to what kids do in 6th grade - gathering photos and blurbs off the internet and sticking them in an album - all to meet the requirement of an Asian studies course she was in because she felt this was the least irrelevant course she had to take so satisfy some requirement or the other. I asked why she wouldnāt do something a bit above the middle school level - like an essay comparing healthcare policies and delivery in the US versus that of an Asian country, and her reply was that they were expected to make something more visual and less verbose, so here we were paying sixty grand to watch her paste pics of Asian models adorned in US fashions, for which she presumably got a better grade than doing something of consequence. </p>
<p>What Iām saying is that a significant part of education industry is a money vacuumer where the actual material taught/learnt is of little consequence. I seriously feel a year on a cruise line with sojourns in a couple of dozen locations across the world will teach better people and cultural skills than what is dished out in these classes, and probably not cost any more.</p>
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<p>Unfortunately, joke courses for non-majors exist at almost every school, and probably many schools have majors with a fair number of joke courses for those in the major. And it is not a new thing.</p>
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<p>But such a thing could never happen at a place anointed as āTop 20ā by USNWR - just ask any of the CC defenders of that Holy Grail of College Excellence.</p>
<p>Credential guaranteed, education optional, it would appear.</p>
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<p>More importantly, the student in question most likely had many non-joke courses to fulfill her requirements and opted for that joke course. Considering sheās pre-med, thatās quite understandable considering the high minimum GPA requirements for med school admissions and the highly cutthroat atmosphere among most pre-meds. </p>
<p>This is one reason why nearly everyone I know who teaches/TAs undergrads cited pre-meds as one group of students they dread teaching/TAing. Especially when they will fight vociferously for a grade change if their test/paper/final grades are a B+ or even an -Aā¦even when such grades are well-deserved or overly generous given the studentās academic performance. Pre-meds are also commonly known at many universities for trying to choose āEasy Aā non-core courses to pump up that GPA.</p>
<p>Your jealousy is showing, ADā¦ Deny it if you mustā¦</p>
<p>I donāt get it.</p>
<p>Arguing it is a very poor idea to attend a USNWR ātop schoolā if you canāt afford it makes sense to me</p>
<p>Arguing ātop schoolsā arenāt worth the money makes sense to me (depending on how much money someone has :)) and one poster has suggested the money can be better spent on travel, etc.</p>
<p>Arguing LACs are better environments for some students makes sense to me</p>
<p>Arguing that it is a good idea to support state schools makes sense to me</p>
<p>Arguing that public is better than private, for society as a whole, makes sense to me</p>
<p>Arguing that pursuing the least expensive undergraduate degree possible, with the idea that the money saved will pay for professional or graduate school, or a house or whatever, makes sense to me</p>
<p>Arguing the education is essentially the same at many schools makes sense to me</p>
<p>Arguing that ātop schoolsā are less academically rigorous and provide less āeducationā than schools at the bottom of the USNWR ratings makes no sense to me</p>
<p>and now we are going to argue what majors are most ārigorous?ā
and ārigorā has more to do with how the class is graded, and how hard a$$ the professors are, than anything to do with education (however we want to define that) acquired?
and we will judge the success of the education by what type of program the student is accepted to after undergrad?
and these non-rigorous schools send students to highly competitive grad/professional programs?</p>
<p>Iām lost</p>
<p>what is the point of an education and /or college again?</p>