Stall said:
Everybody with a little common sense knows this, even if they don't before they go, they will know after they start going to one.
This is why if I had great pull and could change things about colleges and universities, I would go in and start slashing the curriculum of each one, because I've been to two, and both have way too many requirements in their "core" curriculums(most of the core classes are just rehashes of things learned in high school and sometimes earlier in life).
It takes up way too much of each students valuable time. I wouldn't take out the whole core, just cut in half, just remove the double and sometimes requirements from each main subject section, as well as remove the Physical Education plus Health class requirement.
Also remove foreign language requirements from degrees that that wouldn't actually benefit from it, or at least create an equivalent degree that doesn't require it(for the people that know it will be a waste of time and money for them). I and I know at least ten other people that went to the university I went to that didn't go for the a creative writing degree like they wanted, because of the moronic foreign language requirement. We knew we didn't need it as writers and that it would waste 4 class hours worth of space, and cost us an extra 2000 dollars at least, probably more if books were included in that calculation.
Alorxico said:
If universities were truly businesses and nothing more, as you claim, they would not have a list of requirements that must be met by the "buyer" to use their "product".
Actually it is absolutely a business. I know many professors that didn't hide it, they admitted to their students that the universities do certain things to make more money.
Think about it:
1.)They of course accept people that can easily pay.
2.)They have requirements on getting in, because, the better the student the longer they might stay and give out more money. Why not let loads of bad students in? Even though it would bring in a little money, chances are those types of students wouldn't stay long, and each student while paying money also takes up resources from the university, if the student doesn't stay long enough, the money paid by the student might not end up being more than the resources that that student used up.
3.)Once the student enrolled, there is the core curriculum. It is full of classes that university has deemed as "important for succeeding in the real world" That they are just classes of basic knowledge that everybody needs to know. The problem is that it turns out that, oh, you don't need just one basic class in that area, you need two, or maybe three. " 'Employers' last year told us that you really need to know this basic skill, so we are increasing the requirement in that area."
My second university actually upped the core requirement in one area when I got there, luckily I had taking an extra class in that area, for the heck of it, before I transferred.
Number three is a red flag that shows that colleges and universities are just businesses. Many many many years ago, universities actually were what they were suppose to be. Their weren't any silly core requirements. Universities were places where people went to narrow their learning. If I had lived way way way back when, I, a person that was interested in literature and becoming a writer, would go to a university get a degree in writing and or literature, and I would only take classes that pertained to my field.
But I didn't go to school way way way back when, I went in this day and age, where only a little over half of my classes had to do with writing and literature. The other 45% had to do with fields I wasn't interested in, at least not from a wanting to be an expert standpoint. A few decades ago, I don't know exactly when, someone came of with the stupid idea that we want people that are "well-rounded" instead of people separated into super expertise categories. We can't have an expert writer that doesn't know how to do complex math or have intimate knowledge of all the sciences. We can't have people not knowing things from other fields, blah blah blah blah blah.
Since there started to be more and more universities, they had to start competing for students and making more money to keep up with the others. They picked up this well-round student idea or "disciplined as one of my crazy professors put it" because they saw that it meant to be well rounded students have to take classes in every one of the main class types, so they made them requirements. Then many years later, when they saw that they needed more money to keep up, they instituted more basic requirements. Required "core" classes means that all students have to take them and that means more money because students can't refuse to take them even if they are stupid requirements, because they can't graduate without them.
Universities these days aren't creating as many full experts these days. Only the truly gifted can come through it as whole experts. The normal people come out messed up and broken because almost half the time they were at a university, their heads were being filled with useless knowledge that they won't use.
Example: I'm a writer, what use was it for me to take two lab sciences, where most of the stuff being taught was also taught to me in grade school. What use do I have for taking higher level math classes, trigonometry isn't going to help me become a better writer, neither is physical education, health, history, other social sciences, and foreign languages. I have done quite a bit of writing over the years, not one bit from any of those classes has helped me be a better writer. They haven't helped me become a better anything, they just filled my head with useless trivia I will never use, will unless I become a contestant on Jeopardy!:
Me: "Thank you Alex, I'll take useless knowledge for 400"
PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW
Alex: "Look at that, it's the daily double."
