How students today view college

cobrat
Sat, 03 Dec 2011 04:42:04 +0000

geeps20:

not on my dime. I’m paying for a service.



IMHO, you’re wrong.

What you’re really paying for is access to an educational opportunity similar to a gym membership. As with the person on a gym membership, most of the onus is on the student to make the most of that access by putting in the requisite effort…including learning how to figure out ways to navigate around or to solve any issues which may arise with that access.

Whose fault is it if someone paying for/using a gym membership decides to not put in the time and effort to take optimal advantage of the access that membership provides?



ucbalumnus:

At a school as selective as an Ivy League university, it is likely that the students in freshman calculus are the ones who were not that good at math, but are just taking it to fulfill some requirement that they do not consider to be core to their major (especially if it is a “calculus for business majors and pre-meds” type of course). The freshmen who are best at and most interested in learning math are likely in sophomore or higher level math courses, in honors courses if available.



Not necessarily. The Ivies and peer elite schools do admit plenty of students whose high schools didn’t provide calculus courses at the equivalent of an Ivy’s freshman calc course or at all. Heard this not only from HS classmates who attended various Ivies, but also from several friends who TAed freshmen calc courses at such universities. From their accounts…most of their students were taking the courses because their high schools didn’t provide adequate equivalents or they didn’t reach that level of math before they graduated…and neither was necessarily an indication they “weren’t good at math”.