'getting admitted is the most exhausting part'

<p>I wonder how common it is for college students to find their academic work relatively easy, even less challenging than all the preparation leading up to college acceptance. Do you know many students who have found this to be the case? I’ve heard of a few who say that they worked harder in high school. These are kids who are attending our premier state school.</p>

<p>Thomas H. Benton wrote about why there’s not much learning that goes on in college, and this was one reason he gave:

[A</a> Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part 2 - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/article/A-Perfect-Storm-in/126969/]A”>http://chronicle.com/article/A-Perfect-Storm-in/126969/)</p>

<p>I like some of the issues that he brings up. </p>

<p>One of the issues brought up is a particular pet peeve of mine–</p>

<p>“Student as consumer”</p>

<p>You see if all the time here about higher education being ‘a business’, etc. etc.</p>

<p>I don’t think this is true for my S who attended our local public high school and now is a rising 4th year at UChicago. The work is challenging and just listening to him discuss various topics with me now, I can tell how much he has grown intellectually. Perhaps its because he’s a philosophy major or the university he attends. I can’t say for sure but I think the experience is variable depending on several factors.</p>

<p>drdom - I know another UChicago student who just finished up his first year, and while I can clearly see that he has grown intellectually, I’m not sure that he’s worked too hard. Then again, his grades reflect that to some extent. :slight_smile: I think that if he were attending a state school, he would probably not be working hard at all, but I’m not sure.</p>

<p>I’m going to suggest that the experience of a philosophy major at the University of Chicago probably bears little resemblance to that of a communications (or business, or engineering) major at Directional State U - or for that matter, at Flagship U.</p>

<p>skrlvr - While I appreciate the negative results of what “student as consumer” has created (at least in Benton’s opinion), I rather like the idea of students and parents being the consumers. If not us, then who is the consumer?</p>

<p>I’ve also heard some argue that it is employers who are the main consumers, since they use college degrees to screen job applicants. Really, if companies did not mandate college degrees for so many jobs, who would be spending the big bucks for a college education?</p>

<p>I agree, annasdad, except for the engineering majors. I think most everywhere engineering majors are working pretty hard in college.</p>

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<p>That’s probably right, but I would hope that a communications or business or engineering major at Flagship U or East Cruiser State would, if he wanted, be able to create a mini-Chicago for himself through choosing his friends, the way he spends time, his interactions with faculty.</p>

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<p>The point was not about working hard. It was about</p>

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<p>Yes, if (a) s/he has the initiative, (b) knows how to go about it, and (c) has the right friends and the right faculty available.</p>

<p>If you come from a rigorous high school, your freshman year general electives are probably not harder than your most academic classes. If the upper level courses in your major are no harder for you than high school was, either you chose an easy major at an easy college or you are a prodigy. :)</p>

<p>I think a lot of liberal arts kids find freshman year pretty easy. In other countries, the distribution credits our kids tend to take early in college are taken during the last year of their equivalent to high school.</p>

<p>I asked my D about this. She thought that the “hardness” of HS and college were different. She finds college easier than HS in that she spends a lot less time in class and has fewer short term assignments to turn in. She finds it harder than HS in the sense that there is more preparation needed for classroom discussion, there is less teacher direction and more individual time managment required and there are longer, more complicated assignments. </p>

<p>Personally, I don’t think that college needs to be “harder” than HS–especially a rigorous college prep HS curriculum to feel I’m getting my money’s worth out of my tuition.</p>

<p>My nephew was a math major at Harvard. He agrees with this. He has always said that Harvard was a breeze.</p>

<p>It depends on the school and the students. Look at graduation rates, and returning sophomore rates and you can get some idea if it is easier to get in than to stay in.</p>

<p>If you take upper-level courses in several fields that are not overlapping, take classes with professors known to be tough with grading, avoid taking classes that repeat material you have already covered, go over the recommended number of credits, and participate in a variety of activities or take on a paying job, college can be quite challenging indeed. For students primarily interested in learning rather than partying or even creating a near-perfect GPA for professional school admission, there are usually many, many opportunities to work harder than they did in a demanding high school curriculum. The trick is in finding balance among committments.</p>

<p>My son deliberately picked a college known for its academic rigor, and he got what he wanted. Most of the classes are quite challenging, and they get plenty of homework. The other kids are smart. They all know why they’re there. They work hard all year long.</p>

<p>You can find a tough school if you look for it.</p>

<p>It depends on the rigor of the hs prep vs the selected college and major. </p>

<p>My son got accepted to Harvey Mudd (engineering). Had he been interested in Harvard, he likely would have been rejected. He went elsewhere for a scholarship… but based on my research, Mudd academics would have been much more intense than Harvard and most other colleges.</p>

<p>“If you take upper-level courses in several fields that are not overlapping, take classes with professors known to be tough with grading, avoid taking classes that repeat material you have already covered, go over the recommended number of credits, and participate in a variety of activities or take on a paying job, college can be quite challenging indeed. For students primarily interested in learning rather than partying or even creating a near-perfect GPA for professional school admission, there are usually many, many opportunities to work harder than they did in a demanding high school curriculum. The trick is in finding balance among committments.” </p>

<p>This very much describes my S’ freshman year at Davidson.</p>

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<p>That’s a good point. Sometimes college should NOT be harder. It should probably be different, with more demands for the student to be self-directed for example, but not necessarily harder in the strict academic sense.</p>

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<p>That confirms this statement by Naomi Schaefer Riley.
Thanks to the wonders of grade inflation and the lack of a serious core curriculum, it is possible to get through Harvard and a number of other high-price universities acing your computer science classes and devoting very little effort to anything else.</p>