I won’t link to the site, but if you google “what will they learn” there is a site that ranks schools based on how comprehensive their core is. The net result is that schools like Regent University and Bluefield College rank ahead of Brown and Amherst. So I don’t know how useful it is on actual rankings. But if you are trying to get a quick idea of whether a school is more “core” or “open”, you can pull up a chart that gives a quick idea. I don’t know how reliable it is, but for someone like me trying to sort through hundreds of schools, it’s at least a general idea that doesn’t require me spending 5 minutes on each school’s website.
It measures how well the colleges’ breadth requirements match ACTA’s idea of what they should be. Some colleges that have heavy breadth requirements like Harvey Mudd, Chicago, and Columbia do not get A grades in that rating because their breadth does not match ACTA’s idea of what it should be.
^^^ Agreed. Taking an example in the LAC realm, Occidental is a school with real breadth requirements that don’t match ACTA’s ideas. And the way in which Oxy organizes its core requirements itself defies the sort of categorization ACTA uses. And even taking those things as givens, it is inaccurate as to what Oxy does require.
I agree it is important to understand what a school’s breadth requirements are in evaluating whether they are a good fit for an applicant’s interests and preferences, but the ACTA site is not a neutral attempt to merely catalog distribution requirements. They are highly subjective ratings undergirded by a prescriptive agenda.
Totally agree that there is an agenda being pushed, and one that I don’t really agree with. And if you are looking for a rigid core, then maybe this isn’t that useful. But I’m using it more as the opposite, looking for open curriculum or liberal distribution requirements. Basically if this site gives it a D or F, then it at least merits a closer look.
Plus you can click on a school and then get more detail. Language is one place where this is useful. Several of the schools that don’t get credit for a language requirement still have one, just not one advanced enough. Although I know there are some holes in their system. Again using language, Cornell requires it in some colleges, but not all. They don’t make that distinction on this site.
All the schools my daughter was accepted to (with one exception) received Fs.
She was looking for a more open curriculum 
Thing is, while the schools might not necessarily require certain courses, that doesn’t mean students won’t be taking classes in those 7 key areas of knowledge. So you could have an A outcome from an F school.
The list has over 100 schools that they give F grades to. It is unlikely that anywhere near that many have open curricula.
Funny. I always thought of an open curriculum as a tremendous plus!
Yep, just using it for a broad survey. I think D is probably ok with distribution requirements that are loose enough to get an F on this list.
What was probably the most useful for me was clicking through on the language requirements. Lots of schools that “fail” the language requirement actually do have a requirement to take classes in a foreign language in college. They just don’t require you to be proficient enough for this organization (no idea where that level is). So when I did my spreadsheet, the schools with a language requirement (even a loose one) got a little X in one of the boxes. Not a deal breaker, but a factor.
Mostly I’m looking for a way to help D weed out 99% of the colleges out there. Right now I feel like there are a couple hundred that are great fits. That’s too many to even have an intelligent conversation about, much less start filling out applications.
I’m not using this to create a final list. Just one tool to try to make it more manageable. Obviously anywhere she considers applying to or probably even visiting will get a much closer look than this survey.
A site I checked relatively recently organized colleges with notably flexible into two groups:
Fully Open
Amherst College
Bennington College
Brown University
Evergreen State College
Hamilton College
New College of Florida
Smith College
Wake Forest College of Wake Forest University
Minimal Requirements
Beloit College
Eugene Lang College of The New School
Grinnell College
Sarah Lawrence College
Vassar College
University of Rochester
Marlboro College
It’s not necessarily. It kind of depends on your school of thought around college education.
There’s one camp (to which it seems like ACTA belongs) that believes that college should impart at least some baseline level of knowledge/education in specific areas. Part of that is that brand-new college students are not necessarily the best arbiters of what they should know, because how do they know what’s important before they’ve gotten a chance to learn it? In that camp, the general sentiment is that educational experts (aka the professors, deans, and academic advisors at universities) should be putting together a general education program that ensure that students are achieving appropriate breadth across areas.
ACTA has very specific beliefs about what they think needs to go into that kind of curriculum, which they list on the site. They believe that proficiency in foreign language requires 3 semesters of study of a foreign language. They also require schools to require a survey course in U.S. history and/or government, which a lot of schools will fail because they allow you to choose any history or other humanities course to fulfill that requirement - or because they roll this into other requirements. You’ll also notice that the list of schools that require economics courses is very short.
So it’s not just about having a structured curriculum; it’s about having one that matches ACTA’s guidelines. For example, Columbia - which most people here are familiar with having a strong Core Curriculum - only gets a B from ACTA, because their Core doesn’t require economics or mathematics. However, what that doesn’t take into account is Columbia’s admissions standards; most Columbia students are entering with the level of math that other universities might require students to take in their first or second year.
There’s another camp that believes that college should be about totally open exploration and that students should be able to take whatever they want in college. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that students shouldn’t get a breadth of educational experiences and learning; there are many in this group who just think students should have control over which classes and experiences they have in those areas. For example, Brown has an F because they have a totally open curriculum and don’t require any of these classes; however, Brown themselves says on their website about their open curriculum that most students create a program of study with their advisors that touches many areas across the disciplines.
Not sure why Rochester counts as “minimal requirements”. It requires at least 3 courses in each of humanities, social studies, and science, similar in volume to breadth requirements at many other schools.
For what it’s worth, @merc81 Kalamazoo College would be in None or Minimal as it requires foreign language and a writing, but does not have other substantive distribution requirements.
@ucbalumnus At least one of Rochester’s clusters is automatically covered by coursework in a student’s major, and engineering students need only one cluster (3 courses) in addition to their major requirements.
My daughter is double majoring in microbiology and public health, so she, too, only had three additional humanities classes, which she chose herself, to take. It would be the same if she were minoring in something rather than double-majoring. There is no language requirement, which was a big deal to her when making her decision.
The combination of “choose your own” courses within the broader requirements and the practice of waiving cluster requirements for areas that are covered by majors and minors, really do make the requirements pretty minimal. And that was a HUGE plus to her when deciding among colleges.
Interestingly, while the lack of language requirement was a primary impetus for prioritizing schools with open curricula for my daughter, as a senior, she’s become interested in ASL and is taking those classes as electives. As was said above, an open curriculum doesn’t necessarily mean students don’t get a broad education, only that the student is in control of the twists and turns that educational journey takes.
In addition, Rochester seems to present few internal barriers within the university. That is, most courses appear to be open to most students, irrespective of major. This may represent a more important aspect with respect to curricular flexibility than those more commonly discussed.
The primary reason I’m looking for open curriculum is because D probably will do pre-med but not be a biology or chemistry major.
It seems like at many schools it’s you do that then you are lucky to graduate in 4 years, and pretty much all of your “free” electives are spent on things like organic chemistry. It would be nice to have room in her schedule for a few things that are quirky and just sound interesting.
dadof4, fully appreciate your approach of using the site as one tool and then refining from there. You are right, there are not alot of resources, that I am aware of at least, that take a systematic approach to evaluating distribution requirements, and you are doing an awesome and sophisticated job of helping your D. FWIW, I think you are doing the refinement piece really, really well.
As a standalone, the site just doesn’t accomplish all that much in my opinion, b/c it doe snot rate whether a school has tight or loose distribution requirements. It rates whether a school has the sort of distribution requirements the organization behind the site approves of. Again, to take Oxy as an example, they rate low on the site, which some might conclude means they are “open.” Well. what they are and they aren’t. They have a core set of distribution requirements that may be more or less attractive to one student or another and that are more restrictive in some senses that more “open” colleges with few or no distribution requirements. But they allow a high degree of flexibility in fulfilling the core compared to the narrow requirements list enforced by the ACTA’s implicit/explicit hierarchy of learning.
I know from your replies you get all that, and the way you are working to help your D find schools that meet all her needs is impressive!
Thanks
Re: #12
Letting students use their major courses in breadth areas is fairly common, not unique to Rochester.
To give you an idea, if your premed daughter were to choose, for example, a literature major at a school with a notably flexible curriculum (e.g., Amherst, Hamilton, Brown, Smith, Grinnell), then about nine of the ~32 courses required for graduation could be selected entirely at her discretion. Beyond this, partial-credit courses (such as music lessons) could also be freely considered. If desired, study abroad could be arranged. PE classes could be added for further variety.
@merc81 that’s exactly what I’m going for. My guess is she ends up economics or something like math or comp sci. If you are mixing them with pre-med you definitely need a break somewhere!
When I told her about Columbia and the core when her brother was looking at it, her response was, “Ya, no. That’s not happening.”
I was not saying that was unique to Rochester. Only responding to your observation that requiring 3 courses in each of humanities, social studies, and science would result in volume to breadth requirements at many other schools. It doesn’t work out that way in reality because the combination of “pick your own” clusters, and further reduction of requirements for engineering students and/or those who double major or minor, actually does result in fairly “minimal” requirements that can be tailored to the student’s interests.
For someone like my daughter, in addition to two majors (one in natural sciences and one in social sciences), one would only have to take four courses—a humanities cluster and a freshman writing seminar—and would be able to create a “cluster” made up of classes that would have been taken as electives in any case (and that could be exactly the kind of “quirky and just interesting” courses that @dadof4kids was inquiring about). By the end of freshman year, it is possible to satisfy those requirements along with as much as half of the pre-med requirements. That makes it easy to take a semester abroad, for instance, without worrying about meeting core + two sets of major requirements. And there were no dreaded language or speech or PE requirements, all of which my daughter wanted to avoid if possible. That is very different than the “must take two classes in each of the following six subject areas plus a writing seminar (or two) plus demonstrate language proficiency” that other schools she was considering required.