This explains quite a lot.
This has been going on for a long time, even in the technical disciplines. Back in the heyday of Silicon Valley, I moved there from the midwest. The managers I interviewed with all told me “We like people from Midwest and East Coast colleges because we have no guarantee what the California graduates know, and don’t have time to try and figure it out.”
It’s kind of like health insurance. Since no one involved in the process is actually paying cash, who cares if an aspirin is $15 ? Since they wont even talk to parents about grades or courses as the students are “adults” - there’s no steady hand to advise on taking the econ class over the anthroplogy. Sure, if your kids respect you and you are paying, they’ll discuss it with you. But what fraction of the student body is that ?
Meanwhile, I am pretty certain that all of these colleges have multicultural requirements so that the students know how to “think correctly”.
Colleges are required to accept un-qualified students to meet racial quotas. I assume they also are or feel that they are required to graduate them also.
“We’re certainly not saying that Harvard or Hopkins or Yale are not good schools, or that their graduates are not smart kids,” said Neal, who attended Harvard and Harvard Law. “What we’re saying is that those schools don’t do a good job at providing their students with a coherent core.”...
This is why I strongly feel that there has to be a system of standardized ‘exit exams’ given to all graduates to assess their knowledge. We have developed a system of educational ‘royalty’ with certain universities enshrouded in a mantle of superiority, without any proof that they deserve it.
What a complete bunch of self-loathing wankers.
When did that happen?
For Bio-Medical research, maybe one of the top three.
For the Physical Sciences and Engineering, maybe one of the top fifteen.
America's premier research institutes haven't changed in a long time...
Harvard, MIT, Stanford, UCBerkeley, Cal Tech.....and the rest of the usual suspects.
you forgot “no show”.
“At Stanford, you can fulfill the American cultures requirement by taking a class on a Japanese drum,”
Could the course be anything like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FtTaDNsyCY
Then let me say it. They are schools living on their reputations.
While it is true that the schools named here do not have core curricula, it does have distribution requirements that mandate taking courses in areas outside of one’s own discipline. So it’s not quite true to say that one could graduate “without ever taking a course in science. Or math. Or history. Or English.” It does mean that the student is allowed to choose what classes he takes in science or math or history to satisfy the requirement that he have so many science, math, or humanities credits, rather than having the entire student body taking the same core classes.
A core curriculum is a good thing when chosen carefully to give students a broad knowledge of our cultural heritage. But the lack of a core curriculum can also give students the time (and thus the opportunity) to focus on their major field of study.
(Note: I use quotation marks to draw attention to the specialties that are populated with idiots for the most part.)