<p>Actually, interesteddad, the question is not broad survey vs. overly narrow specialization.</p>
<p>Some students do like broad survey courses and benefit hugely from such courses. But others would far prefer courses focused more narrowly on some topic which they can explore in greater depath from a wide variety of perspectives. It’s the age old breadth vs. depth discussion. If one teaches Plato to NATO in 13 weeks, one cannot do the same justice to discrete topics as if one taught a course on the French Revolution. It’s not about profs liking to teach only what they specialize in. I doubt that there is a prof either at Harvard or at Swarthmore who can teach four courses per year solely on what that prof is/has been doing research on.</p>
<p>My daughter goes to one of those “core” schools. She affirmatively looked for that, and valued it, although she’s a classic unbalanced student. Once she got there, though, she has mixed feelings at best about the core. As a non-science person, she was stuck in what felt like a second-rate bio course, and a math course full of people who (like her) didn’t want to be there. (She could have taken the science-track bio course, but she didn’t want to work that hard on a course she really didn’t care much about. She understands that she was being hypocritical.) On the humanities side, her core section was filled with people who had no meaningful experience interpreting literature on a college level and were actively hostile to the idea that it was worth doing. She said: “An unfocused survey class full of boys who are incompetent at reading, don’t care to learn how to be competent, and feel privileged to take up class time talking about how stupid it is: I already did that. It was called high school.”</p>
<p>She really enjoyed her social science core course, though, and fulfilling her art requirement. She still likes the idea of the core.</p>
<p>This is the first quarter (out of five) in which she isn’t taking any classes to meet core requirements, and not coincidentally she is far more interested and engaged in her schoolwork than before.</p>
<p>I think Mini had it right. These debates about how to structure core curriculum or distribution requirements are much ado about nothing. The real motivation is simple: to force students to sample a range of liberal arts disciplines. All the philosophical discussions are just a smokescreen for what is ultimately a nuts and bolts issue…how to teach “sampler” courses and force students to take them.</p>
<p>For example, if you look at the core science courses at Harvard, they look strikingly like the “rocks for jocks” courses offered by science departments at schools that solve the nuts and bolts problem by mandating 3 from Column A, 3 from Column B, 3 from Column C.</p>
<p>Likewise, the literature core courses look just like the mandatory prereq freshman courses in the English department at a “3 Column” distribution school.</p>
<p>So, the real debate is purely nuts and bolts. Do you force students to meet distribution requirements by requiring them to sample many departments, each of which has courses designed for samplers? Or, do you force them to chose from a limited assortment of core courses designed for samplers? I’m not sure it matters, philosophically. It obviously doesn’t matter to prospective students; there are three posts on the topic of this sweeping curricular reform on the Harvard forum here.</p>
<p>It matters for Harvard, because their old system was a bureaucratic nightmare. Take 7 core courses from 11 fields, but you don’t know which 7 you have to take until you have decided on a major. They even acknowledge the problem in the Core Curriculum handbook.</p>
<p>It obviously matters from another nuts and bolts standpoint. If you require 1500 freshmen to take one of seven core courses in social sciences, simple math says that these courses won’t be 12 student seminars! So, a core approach may be beneficial to a unversity from a cost standpoint by mandating that each student take at least one quarter of his courses at the college in a very large lecture format. By the same token the “sampler” courses in a 3-column college are sometimes quite large as well, so it’s certainly not an either/or scenario.</p>
What makes this different from distribution requirements?
Is the intention to design a lot of new courses, or to recategorize existing classes?</p>
<p>I’m a fan of my S’s core curriculum – which really is a core curriculum, with everyone reading the same books and taking the same core classes. The exception is when the university added a course designed around the broad idea of exposing all students to the scientific method. It produced a class that doesn’t work for anyone. It’s slow torture for the science students and panic-inducing for the humanities students. I hope Harvard doesn’t design a lot of courses around those broad concepts and that work for no one.</p>
<p>It is possible to design a curriculum that offers both breadth and depth. For example, the major cultures requirement at S’s school, which aims at exposing students to non-Western cultures through at least two courses. They can either take survey-type classes in two different areas (say East Asia and Middle East), or they can choose to take the second class in the same culture as the first and draw from a list that includes course offerings from a variety of departments – economics to music.</p>
<p>I do not believe that core courses are seminars and are not meant to be. But there are Core courses that have low enrolments (i.e. below 30) and there are those which attract monster crowds. Would I have been happier if my S had not taken a course that had nearly 200–170 more than had been projected? You bet. But that was his choice. And he did have a choice among courses in that broad category, just as the students who flock to Michael Sandel’s class by the hundreds also have a choice.</p>
<p>LACs have their own limitation. S1 at his LAC was shut out of courses he needed for his own major or to fulfill requirements. S2 has so far not been shut out of any course. He is currently in a course designed for students in his field. There are six of them in it. Harvard actually has a plethora of courses that have only 3-4 students because the philosophy is to offer a course if even only one student wants to take it (this does not take into account independent study classes).</p>
<p>I don’t know where you get the idea that there are only 7 core courses in the social sciences: economics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, government, history are all well represented with multiple offerings (and that’s already 7 disciplines) in the current Core.</p>
<p>I have not had a chance to read the curricular review report. But from what I understand, it’s more than about changing distribution requirements and category labels. There is an effort to create new and more interdisciplinary courses–such as the new Life Sciences courses, or one of the Silk Road which combines the study of culture, history, and music of peoples on the Silk Road. Whether the new curriculum succeeds or fails will depend largely on how many of these new courses are created and how well they work out.</p>
<p>And whether or not it will distribute students more equally among courses remains to be seen. I suspect students will continue to flock to Steven Pinker, Gregory Mankiw, Michael Sandel, and other superstars or to courses that are highly topical or part of the zeitgeit du jour.</p>
<p>Obviously, there will be popular and unpopular core courses. But, on average, 13 core courses in a mandatory field would mean 125 students per course, minus those who major in that field and satisfy the core requirement with an department course.</p>
<p>BTW, many of the core courses look great. But, they would be just as good if they were a departmental offering. Whether you offer them in a department or in an extra-departmental layer of “core courses” is simply a nuts and bolts issue. </p>
<p>The Silk Road course is currently being taught under the old core course system. It’s under the Foreign Cultures core division. Without the additional core course layer, you would simply cross-list the course in the Music and History departments.</p>
<p>The courses exist outside the confines of a department. They are special “core” courses.</p>
<p>That’s a different approach to nuts and bolts than offering the same courses in departments and requiring students to sample multiple departments.</p>
<p>It’s just two different ways of arranging the deck chairs.</p>
<p>I gather, looking at those, that essentially the deal is that many basic courses in your field of interest will satisfy the core requirement for the category in which your major falls. No science major will be required to take any of the science core courses, because several courses most of them will take anyway satisfy the core. And the basic Econ 1 course, as well as the next-level micro and macro courses, satisfy the “social analysis” core requirement.</p>
<p>That means: (1) The average number of kids taking the special courses in any specific core area goes way down. If you disregard all the kids who take one of the basic economics courses, the other social analysis courses shouldn’t be that crowded. Ditto for science once you cull out all premeds and bio, chemistry, physics (and combinations thereof) majors. (2) By and large, the special core courses will be ghettos for kids not interested in those fields.</p>
<p>Agreed. Which is exactly the way it works when you arrange the deck chairs in a “3 from column A…” approach and stick all the courses in the departments. The Physics department at a “3 Column” school offers real physics courses and a couple of “sort of physics for students who hate science” courses that can be used to satisfy the science requirement by students who hate science. Same difference.</p>
<p>The “Core” approach is just putting lipstick on the pig, so to speak (e.g. “pedalogical desirata”).</p>
<p>“As part of the mission to improve teaching generally at the College, we propose as pedagogical desiderata that all general education courses be taught, to the extent practicable, in interactive formats that give students an opportunity to discuss the material with the faculty member teaching the class and with each other.”</p>
<p>Wasn’t this the most important part? And does this mean that courses that are not “general education” are better taught WITHOUT giving students the opportunity to discuss the material with the faculty member teaching the class and with each other?</p>
<p>My wife and I (separately) both took Bio for Poets to satisfy what was then a very loose math/science distributional requirement. (My Calculus AP got me out of the math part of it, and the one bio course was the only “science” course I took in college.) It was a lecture course with very half-assed lab sections. Anyway, we both remember it as a fabulous class – taught by a very charismatic Nobellist, who apparently really enjoyed teaching biology and scientific method as they related to social issues to non-science kids. It was a huge class because its reputation was so good, but still a great learning experience.</p>
<p>My best friend took Rocks For Jocks as a junior, and promptly changed his major to Geology (truly a life-alterning moment, since most of his career has been as a quasi-scientist with an environmental group).</p>
<p>So the ghetto courses don’t have to be pedagogical disasters.</p>
<p>I was a Bio major, intending to be pre-med, but when I took an Art History course to satisfy a distribution requirement it changed my life. I wound up going to grad school and getting an MA in Art History and now (through various twists and turns) I work with rare books. I think distrubution requirements can be a wonderful thing.</p>
<p>social analysis is not the same thing as social sciences.<br>
For the moment, there is a limited number of courses that are similar to Life Sciences in being multidisciplinary and satisying more than one requirement. But members of the faculty are encouraged to offer more. Again, the success of the curricular reform will not depend on what is available today, but what is available in the next few years. The jury is definitely still out on that one.</p>
<p>Sac:
The number one gripe among Harvard students is being required to take courses outside their particular area of interest and lack of choice. When Harvard students complain about lack of community they are not thinking academics; they’re thinking lack of a student center, not enough university-wide events such as rock concerts. It is so different from Columbia or Chicago which students attend precisely because of the required Core–no griping on that account (or perhaps Harvard students like to gripe more than others? perish the thought!)</p>
<p>As for pedagogical desiderata, they apply to more than the Core. There was a report on Teaching and Learning that came out perhaps one week ago, where it is proposed, inter alia, that teaching be made a more siginificant factor in hiring and promoting.</p>
<p>My personal experience is that the Core is a major subject of griping at both Columbia and Chicago. A current Columbia student told me that the best thing about the Core is that it gives everyone something in common to complain about. The fact that most of the kids at those schools chose their college in part because they wanted its Core doesn’t mean that they actually like the Core when they get there. If anything, the fact that they wanted it probably raises their expectations and produces more griping.</p>
<p>"It is so different from Columbia or Chicago which students attend precisely because of the required Core . . . "</p>
<p>Is this really true? I’m prepared to believe it about Chicago. I am also sure that some kids do choose Columbia because they are truly attracted to the core – and, presumably, anyone who goes to Columbia does not have an insatiable desire for the open curriculum of Brown. But my suspicion is that most kids attend Columbia because – its Columbia (and they didn’t get into H,Y, or P).</p>
<p>WesDad, remember that Columbia is an ED school. At least a third of the class never even applied to H, Y or P. And Columbia’s selectivity and yield are close to HYP levels. I think there are a lot of kids who apply to Columbia and Chicago because they like the idea of the Core, and who don’t necessarily apply to HYP. That was my daughter’s case, at least (although she did apply to one of them, but she would have chosen Columbia over it had she gotten in to both), and she knew several others who did the same.</p>
<p>Well, as I said on the other thread, Wesdad, I don’t agree. Actually, almost half the class were ED. They’re there because that’s where they want to be. I know that, though there are parts of the Core he has liked more than others, my S picked Columbia precisely for the Core. It’s without a doubt the biggest selling point for Columbia, which is an extremely different kind of school from HYP.</p>
<p>As a matter of fact, there is, counter-intuitively, a lot of overlap in apps between Brown and Columbia. I think it’s because both, from different directions, stress the life of the mind kind of education (not that other schools don’t, of course.) My S liked both Wes and Columbia a lot, for the same reason.</p>
<p>I don’t think kids pay any attention to distribution requirments in choosing a college. I think they choose a school for other reasons (Columbia, NYC, trendy, whatever) and then parrot the school’s talking points about distribution requirements, if they even know what they are. The exception may be a school like Brown, where the lack of requirements is the school’s main talking point identity, just like any student enrolling at Haverford is gung-ho in favor of the Honor Code.</p>
<p>For the most part, this is probably a rational approach. For most students, the distribution requirements are a minor irritant at worst. On the other hand, the lack of interest in a fundamental academic policy probably shows that we (collectively) probably do a poor job of helping our kids really think about what college will be like…hence the ridiculous number of “what is the best Economics department” posts that we see on College Confidential. As if there’s an elite college anywhere that can’t offer a kid 12 solid undergrad Econ courses.</p>
<p>Well, I gotta differ here. For Columbia students, having an almost unique kind of set up, much rarer actually than Brown’s, you’d be nuts not to be aware of and looking for it, since it’s going to dominate your academic career. But that’s because it’s not a set of distribution requirements; it’s an extremely extensive, and intensive, set of common, required courses. Not intending to experience that would be tantamount to going to St. Johns and asking when we were going to get to the modern stuff.</p>