<p>And if the open book chem test was not enough for people to pass. The teacher offered extra credit for essentially doing your HW</p>
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<p>Open book tests that I have seen generally meant that the instructor was using more difficult problems with greater emphasis on conceptual thinking and understanding, rather than just memorizing a formula out of the book. Indeed, real life problems are not closed book tests, nor do they necessarily fit neatly into the formulas and examples found in the book.</p>
<p>How do 10% of graduating undergrads start at 70K+? That’s a lot! That’s not even just Engineering grads, it’s all grads.</p>
<p>I agree that community colleges can vary greatly in level of difficulty. From what I’ve observed, the easiest community colleges are the ones that boast really high transfer rates to prestigious schools. These schools tend to suffer from ridiculous grade inflation. I got to be friends with several classmates who attended schools like this, and despite having stellar grades at their community colleges, they really struggled at the University. One of them literally had straight As in his community college – a 4.0 GPA – yet he graduated from the Uni with a 2.6 or something like that. Another was an international student with poor writing and English comprehension skills, yet he managed to get As and Bs in his CC’s English and writing classes. He explained that he simply copied essays that he found online, and the elderly lady who taught the classes never bothered to check.</p>
<p>My community college was designed to send students to CSULB and CSUF and it was actually fairly tough to get As there. They didn’t need to inflate GPAs since the CSUs don’t have minimum GPA requirements. When I asked the counselor about what I needed to do to transfer to UC schools, she seemed as clueless as I was – almost all of the students transferred to those two CSU schools. My GPA at UCSD actually ended up being significantly higher than my GPA at my CC, although part of that was due to the fact that I found the courses and lectures at the Uni far more interesting than the ones at the CC where courses were often taught straight out of text books.</p>
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<p>CSUs do have minimum transfer GPA requirements. The minimum is 2.0 in general, but impacted campuses and majors have higher requirements. For example, San Jose State lists the transfer GPA requirements by major for the fall 2011 and spring 2012 admissions cycles:</p>
<p>[SJSU</a> Admission](<a href=“http://info.sjsu.edu/web-dbgen/narr/admission/rec-1211.html]SJSU”>http://info.sjsu.edu/web-dbgen/narr/admission/rec-1211.html)
[SJSU</a> Admission](<a href=“http://info.sjsu.edu/web-dbgen/narr/admission/rec-1210.html]SJSU”>http://info.sjsu.edu/web-dbgen/narr/admission/rec-1210.html)</p>
<p>CSU Long Beach does not provide thresholds, but shows 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile GPAs for admitted students in impacted majors:</p>
<p>[CSULB</a> Enrollment Services](<a href=“http://www.csulb.edu/depts/enrollment/admissions/transfer_gpa.html]CSULB”>http://www.csulb.edu/depts/enrollment/admissions/transfer_gpa.html)</p>
<p>Yeah… but a 2.0 minimum just means you need to pass your classes. It really can’t be any lower.</p>
<p>I know a person who is a 4rth year in college as a CS major. She already has a job lined up after graduation with a $100k salary at Microsoft.</p>
<p>"I know a person who is a 4rth year in college as a CS major. She already has a job lined up after graduation with a $100k salary at Microsoft. "</p>
<p>Yeah but that’s one person. Obviously some people will graduate and get 70K+ jobs. But 10% is a lot more than I thought.</p>
<p>FWIW, these things change. Even at my CC, which I recommend to anybody wanting to start college, my linear algebra professor said (and this is a guy who also works at Stage Flagship School several miles down the road) “I think you get a better math education here than at <flagship school=”">, but I don’t think that was true ten or fifteen years ago."</flagship></p>
<p>Professors at CC’s are there to teach. Most of them love to teach their subjects, and chose the CC route to devote their time to teaching.</p>
<p>Professors at large universities (mainly public research U’s), are there first and foremost to research. They are expected to publish work, bring in grant money, etc. They have to teach, but many don’t want to teach. You might have the privilege of taking a class from a world renowned professor in a certain topic, but that doesn’t guarantee he’s the best guy to actually teach it to you, or the class will be an amazing enlightenment on the subject. Knowledge of a subject and the ability to teach it to others in an effective manner, are not necessarily traits exhibited by the same individual.</p>
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<p>Keep in mind different areas of the country have different costs of living. I know one of my friends got two offers from the same company, in a major metropolitan suburb, the other in the middle of nowhere. Naturally, the big city one offered way more money. Their pay scale is standardized, you just get a cost of living adjustment depending on where the office is.</p>
<p>In 1978 the average engineer from my school had 15 job offers. Starting salaries averaged $28,000. That translates to roughly $92,500 in today’s dollars. They also had zero deductible/no co-pay health insurance that stayed with you after retirement and a company funded pension. Every single graduating engineer had a job.</p>
<p>In 1987, the year I graduated, engineers averaged between 2 and 3 job offers, starting salaries of $38,000 ($72,000 today equivalent), and about 80% had offers at graduation. Health insurance was company paid with a small deductible and co-pay. Most companies offered 401k matching for a retirement plan. Tuition reimbursement was 100% and you could still take classes on company time. If a Texas Instruments production worker wanted to become an engineer, the company would pay for their college.</p>
<p>One of the downsides of having too many people is that engineering is now a commodity, treated like a tool at the rental shop. A company expects to be able to hire an engineer for the length of the job, and that engineer should already have all of the training necessary to be productive from day 1. If nobody with that exact skillset is willing to leave a secure job for a 6 month assignment paying $35/hr with no benefits, company executives gripe to congress about a “lack of skilled workers.”</p>
<p>Yes, there are still a few deep-pocket companies that pay well and have good benefits, but the rules of the economy for most are changing rapidly. We are expected to spend periods of time unemployed. We are expected to have stagnant wages. We have to maintain our technical competence on our own time with our own money. We are required to chip in about $10,000 for the health insurance. We fund our own retirements, and are lucky to have as much as we have put in. </p>
<p>On the plus side, I hear share-cropping may be coming back in Alabama. No college required.</p>