Completely agree! My d21 humanities kid at Duke gets the biggest chuckle out of Stem kids who take a course in her area thinking it will be easy, and then some are shocked by all the reading and writing requirements or are upset when they struggle to get the average grade. D23 is a Stem kid who happens to excel at writing and loves that her dual-degree (chem/ engineering) program allows for more humanities electives than a single Engineering degree would.
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My son is a geography geekâŠand he laughed at the business students who were in his classes, that were aghast because there was more than 30 minutes of work a week.
He had passion for itâŠbut others sought the easy gradeâŠas he did, hence he took Womenâs Studies, which apparently is light weight work wiseâŠas one of his GEs in whatever category it filled.
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Sometimes itâs a matter of using known easy Gen Eds/Easy A classes to boost the gpa for scholarship reasons. It gives a little breathing room in case they donât ace their STEM classes.
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I would say just about all major universities have some easy/fluff classes but you canât just guess based on the subject but people know which ones they are like the athletes, frats, premed and prelaw especially. I would also hazard to guess that at some larger public universities some departments have actively made some classes easier to make sure they get positive enrollment numbers to stave off any downsizing or elimination.
If it works in that direction, then it presumably works in the reverse direction, yes? The English and history majors seeking out the astronomy and geology gen-eds as breathing room in case they donât ace their (writing-intensive) humanities classes?
(The undercurrent of recurring assumptions in this subthread that STEM students inherently take a harder schedule than other students is really bothering me.)
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I think it is important to remember that there are âeasyâ entry classes in almost every subject* at college. I fondly remember âPhysics for Poetsâ and âRocks for Jocksâ being offered at my Top 10 school for those who didnât want to take âhardâ science classes. Pretty sure STEM classes like that are offered at every college and university.
The problem (as I see it) is when the assumption is that even upper level Humanities courses will be easy for any student looking for a breather class.
*Only Humanities classes I can think of that most people will acknowledge as being challenging are Foreign Language classes and that is probably based on our pretty uniformly poor teaching of FL in primary and secondary schools in the US. Fast paced and challenging unless the student is good at language or comes in with previous knowledge base.
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I think the problem could be deeper than just assuming upper level humanities courses are easy. Intro level humanties courses can be hard as well. A basic Intro to Philosophy can be challenging for people who donât like to read and write a lot, and depending on the professor, youâll need to apply a lot of analytical thinking.
There are of course definitely Easy-A classes and plenty of students game the system to find them to fulfill their GE requirements. And while I think taking some easy and fun courses in college is ok, I can see where some students would find it frustrating that they have to take them. Of course, they could seek out the more challenging classes to fulfill their GE requirements and get a lot of value out of that, but then they need to work harder than their peers to maintain a GPA which is one criteria used for grad school and future jobs.
So, the incentive structure is off. One thing I would argue is the STEM student who does challenge themselves by taking a hard GE course, is better off overall than the student who just seeks out the easy A. But itâs not easily quantifiable, so itâs hard to blame most students for not seeking them out.
So, Iâm sort of contradicting myself, b/c Iâm ok with a few fun easy classes in college to help break up the grind of what will be a rigorous 4 years, and they can learn some interesting things they might not have otherwise. However, I can see that being incredibly frustrating for very serious students (and the parents paying for it), and while they might be able to instead choose harder more rigourous GE classes, the incentive structure is less readily quantifiable and thus may feel less satisfying.
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My STEM kid took one class outside her major every semester in college. She was able to take what she wanted because of a generous AP/DE policy. She really enjoyed those courses - a series of communication classes for a leadership certification, a smattering of honors seminar courses (jazz, philosophy, space), two classes while on a study abroad in art history & travel blogging, a business accounting/finance course, and a dance class. It was a good break from her chemical engineering courses and she was exposed to topics totally out of her wheel house. For her, they were easy As but I was happy she got to experience those courses outside of her major and I didnât feel like it was a waste of $. She could have graduated a semester early without those classes but we encouraged her to make the most of her time in college. Plus graduating early would have also cost her the ability to have a concentration, get published, and take some graduate level courses. All of which have been very helpful in her job.
I realize that is a privileged position and we have only one child who we budgeted to go to a much more expensive school so money wasnât an issue.
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But even with FL I remember when I was an UG that apparently Portuguese was the easiest of the FLs offered if you were starting from the beginning. This may be related to my earlier point of some Depts making grading easier to boost enrollment as I donât think Portuguese is any easier than Spanish, Italian or French but I could see how it might not be as popular a choice all things being equal.
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At the beginning levels, Portuguese is a piece of cake if you already know another romance language, especially Spanish. If youâre starting from scratch, I donât think itâs any easier or harder. But of course there are likely fewer Portuguese instructors, so they might make the course easier.
When I was in college, Swedish and ASL had the reputation of being the easiest way to fulfill the language requirement, probably since each has one instructor looking to fill classes
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of course but when you are starting from scratch it probably isnât. Spanish seems to be the easiest to at least pronounce because of itâs limited and straightforward phonemes.
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Portuguese is considered a Critical Language to the US and is one of the languages that required no previous study to receive a CLS award for college students.
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Interesting- I am bilingual (Spanish) and at my previous job we had a huge influx of families from Brazil. I wish I spoke Portuguese. I was able to speak to parents in Spanish and they understood me for the most part and I could understand them if they spoke slowly, but ultimately had to rely on google translate. This is a great program to know about.
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I remember hearing about this program on CC, I think @Lindagaf daughter was awarded one of these scholarships (it is a highly competitive program!).
Yes, she was awarded a CLS. Itâs very important for the student to have a very compelling reason for wanting to study their intended foreign language. They will also need exceptional professor recommendations. The high school version of this program is NSLI-Y.
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Linguist here: Whether a language is easy or difficult depends entirely on (a) prior exposure, (b) some hard-to-measure factor that makes learning languages easier for some people, and (c) personal motivation.
(a) is quite interesting, because it isnât a yes-or-no sort of thing. Spanish, for example, is more straightforward than, say, Hindi for a lot of US-based English speakers because there is a lot of passive Spanish exposure in the US. However, thereâs also exposure to similar languagesâSpanish and Portuguese are quite similar, so some of that passive Spanish exposure transfers over to Portuguese learning.
That exposure can also (for English speakers) come from English itself, though. English is part of the Germanic language family, and so Dutch and German are pretty straightforward compared to Italic languages like Italian and even Spanish (leaving aside the effects of passive exposure to Spanish), and those are likely to be simpler for those coming from a monolingual English background than more distantly related but still Indo-European languages like Hindi and Pashto, and those still simpler than languages where we know of no historical relationship with English such as Mandarin and ASL.
Ultimately, though, all languages are equally complicated, which means that in the abstract all languages are equally hard to learnâbut language learning never occurs in the abstract, and so people tend to make generalizations about the ease or difficulty of language learning based on the experiences of themselves or others they know, which is a problem because previous exposure and personal motivation are such big deals. All other things being equal, for a Mandarin speaker to learn Cantonese is more straightforward than for an English speaker to learn Cantonese, and for an Italian speaker to learn Spanish is more straightforward than for a Korean speaker to learn Spanish. That doesnât mean Cantonese or Spanish is harder or easier to learn, it means that the learning of the language will be influenced by the language learner.
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Great explanation!
Update on my DS23 who stumbled his first semester at Purdue. After giving him some time to consider his options, he said last week that he wanted to go back, change to exploratory, and âtry to see if he can find something that interests him.â (He has said all along he âdoesnât see the pointâ of his classes.) We advised him to get in touch with his advisor ASAP to rework his schedule, which he still hadnât done as of this morning. Classes resume 1/8.
This morning we told him to contact his advisor today, but also reminded him that if heâs feeling pressured to attend college when itâs not what he wants at the moment, heâs welcome to pause, live here at home, and figure out his direction while working and contributing to the household. I just checked in with him again to see if heâd been in touch with his advisor, and he said he really doesnât want to go back.
So I guess thatâs that, for now at least. Heâs giving up a boatload of scholarships, but I have a feeling if heâd gone back his performance wouldnât have been much better than this past semester, and theyâd be pulled anyways. Or weâd be bringing him home mid-semester.
This is a kid who graduated high school with a 4.6 gpa, but really doesnât have a particular passion for anything. So I guess the next step is to support him in finding, if not a passion, at least a direction.
Weâve seen quite a few young men lapsing out of college in the past few years. Iâm hopeful he will benefit from a break, but also quite worried heâs avoiding every difficult option because thatâs easier in the short run.
Please think good thoughts for him and us. I really appreciate the stories folks have shared about kids whoâve taken a curvier path to adulthood. If anyone has specific recommendations for how to help an intelligent kid discover his purpose, Iâm all ears.
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Thank you so much for sharing your familyâs story and the updates. I donât have any advice to offer. But Iâll offer my own story in case it helps anyone.
I was a national merit scholar who was offered a full ride to my state flagship. My gut feeling was that I didnât want to attend college at all. At the time I couldnât have explained it much beyond just not wanting to be there, and feeling like I wouldnât have the drive to pass my courses. My mother wouldnât hear of it. She screamed and screamed and screamed at me when I worked up the guts to tell her this. It was clear that any alternative to college was not an option. I felt like an embarrassment and pretty worthless. So I planned to major in philosophy (!!) just because I couldnât think of anything else and at least I might figure some stuff out if I did that. I enrolled at a small religious LAC out of state.
Long story short, I had a nervous breakdown just before I graduated HS and I never attended that college. I confided in my pastor who mandated professional mental health care. The good news is that my psychologist quickly convinced my parents to change their attitude, and they mostly supported my choices after that. My mental health bounced back quickly. I started a full-time job the week after HS, and worked hard for years at low-paying jobs. I got married. My amazing spouse supported me when I grew restless at work, and encouraged me when I was finally motivated to attend college. Spouse was in a PhD program and I was the breadwinner, but we made it work. I went to the state flagship that had originally offered me the full ride, though I had to pay for it all myself since it was 6 years later. I thrived in school and am now a professor.
I am grateful that I didnât go through years of floundering in college at age 18. Your son is lucky to have supportive but firm parents, who are doing all the right things. Take heart. It is hard. But he will find his way even if itâs a bumpy road.
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My biggest piece of advice would be to make sure he gets a job asap. I took time off from college because I wasnât sure I wanted to be there, and my mom arranged for me to start a job substitute teaching the day after I came home âon leaveâ.
Getting phone calls at 4:30-5:30am every day letting me know where I was scheduled to fill in as a teacher, driving up to 45 mins each way to the schools and then getting those very low paychecks helped me decide I did want to go back to school (working hard at school was easier than working as a substitute teacher on call!).
I donât regret my time off (just under one term) and I was still able to graduate on time. But I did have a new appreciation for how hard people work for how little when they donât have a college degree.
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