Seems like rigor varies, probably like Caltech > MIT > Chicago > most others, although Chicago’s position depends on whether humanities is difficult for the student.
My own suspicion is the author is really bitter about grade deflation at Princeton, that it is harder to make A’s and students have to grind harder to make the top grades. I just don’t see Princeton classes being more time consuming or rigorous (Yale requires 36 credits to graduate, so 4/8 semesters require 5 classes vs the 1 that the author was griping about), just that fewer people make A’s. Maybe he didn’t want to come off as a grade grubber so he threw the less time for meaningful other activities out as his more “noble” complaint.
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I’m not sure the author’s gpa is relevant though? I mean, if they have a 4.0 does it make the argument more valid?
Princeton students can PDF 4 classes (?-I think) so if grades were the concern, there’s an avenue to address that a bit.
The argument is that some of the academic requirements/practices carry opportunity costs, and that a paradigm that values rigor for the sake of rigor is not the best way to evaluate those trade-offs.
I don’t necessarily agree with all the points raised in the article, but there’s a reasonable discussion to be had around that central point. (Including whether rigor alone is, in fact, the rationale for some of the requirements).
It isn’t necessary to question the author’s motives or character to have that discussion.
Some of the comments in this thread (not yours) seem more like grievances about youngsters these days projected onto this one article, perhaps without having read it.
For example, I do not see a connection to WFH, marathon training, etc., in this article. I also don’t think a Princeton student working on a WWF project is necessarily primarily motivated by resume-padding, as was mentioned by another poster. The resume will be good either way.
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I wonder why questioning a status quo automatically has to raise “suspicion” at all?
Can people still interrogate/consider the validity of an issue based on nothing but its merits, instead of assigning motives?
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On one point, yes. I would view a student’s perspective that they’re being given empty, time-consuming work differently if that student has a 4.0 vs. a 3.3. I have no external way to judge whether that’s true or not. A 4.0 student who is mastering all the material is in a better position to evaluate which assignments/readings boosted their learning as compared to a student who is struggling to keep up.
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I was just trying to suggest a more cynical reason why the author was complaining. Neither my kids nor I attended Princeton, so I can’t say that the course requirements are harder than comparable schools. As to observable “merits”, I can say that graduating with 33 credits is a lower requirement than Yale’s 36. The Princeton distributional requirements seem to be more rigid; it certainly is not an open curriculum, but neither is it a mandatory core. To complain about some classes requiring 200 pages of reading as if that were a big thing is at the very least misplaced if you are familiar with reading requirements for many literature, history, poli sci and other humanities courses. If in fact there was an over abundance of “busy work” in Princeton courses that did not enhance an understanding of the subject matter, sure that is something to complain about, but somehow I just don’t see that. The professors certainly have no motive in taking time to prepare, create, teach, grade meaningless material/problem sets.
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I see this argument as analogous to the controversy over medical residents working 40 hours in a row with no sleep, or ICU nurses having their patient loads increased.
Some die- hards believe “this is how I was trained, this is how it’s meant to be”. Others look at the data- patient outcomes, health issues among staff, traffic accidents as staff drives home after shifts- and conclude that MORE doesn’t necessarily mean more rigorous, it just means MORE.
I think in certain disciplines the bias is towards the fire hose; in others, less work (with valuable or not) means more time for creativity, better thinking, higher level abstraction.
I do think that Princeton is a poor fit for a HS kid who wants to prioritize EC’s over academic work. Harvard has a much better track for kids who “major” in Hasty Pudding, Editor in Chief of the Crimson, etc.
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I can provide the campus update-students majoring in engineering/hard sciences wonder what this econ kid is complaining about.
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I disagree.
This is the the quote that indicates that they really are expecting an easier time, now that they’ve “made it”:
I am actually disappointed in this student. There are plenty of great arguments which show that “busy work” doesn’t help academic development. There are reams of publications about this from across the world. However, because the student doesn’t believe in extensive reading, the arguments and supporting evidence are these:
A. Princeton students are the top 6% of all student who applied, which demonstrates that they are ambitious
B. The author personally don’t understand how having rigorous classes helps them become leaders so he thinks that these classes are not needed.
C. Students tell the author that that students tend to take a fifth easier class every semester, which means that the other four classes are too difficult
D. The author read that there are classes which require reading 200 pages a week, and therefore the reading requirements for all classes is too extensive
E. The author heard from some students that their homework problems are time intensive, and those students don’t think that the problems help them understand the material, so this is a problem for all students
F. The academic load of this academic institution is too heavy for the author to engage in extensive non-academic activities, which means that it’s too heavy.
The author should look at how weak his arguments are and how weak his supporting evidence for his claims are as an an important lesson in why extensive reading is required for classes.
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Perhaps as a sophomore he hasn’t learned time-management yet? From his linked-in it appears he never worked. Regardless, his immaturity in this piece is likely to have consequences.
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Totally thought he was a BSE major drowning in P-sets (I have some empathy for that) 
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This has potential to become the princetoniest of Princeton threads ever.
"Princeton students are often described by campus activists to be far less engaged with political protests than students at peer institutions, demonstrated — for example — by Princeton’s lackluster Divest protests compared to Yale, Harvard, or Penn. "
Go Princeton!
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Just looking at this thread. The article is pretty humorous.
There is a legitimate question as to whether the required work produces benefits or it is just hard work. And, putting on my economist hat, the question becomes how does the marginal benefit of the additional work compare to the marginal cost of the additional work.
And here, who is defining the marginal benefit and the marginal cost (The cost of several additional hours of student work is a lot lower to the professor than to the student).
A follow-up question is whether the student is capable of judging at the time whether the rigor of extra work is valuable (and compared to what), at least until later. Remember the Karate Kid?
Princeton does have fairly extensive distribution requirements that are hard to evade (relative to, say, Harvard, where the non-humanities folks could take courses like Celtic Poetry, that were known to be really easy). I advised ShawSon to focus on schools that had lesser distribution requirements given his dyslexia.
Back in the Dark Ages, it was 400 pages of reading a week in a number of the humanities courses (not a mere 200 pages weekly). But then, we walked to school 2 miles uphill each way in the snow.
Being highly selective means that one’s Princeton courses are populated with very talented kids. Probably the best taught course I took in college was with a legendary professor. The title was something like Game Theory and Mathematical Programming. There were, I believe, five kids in the class who had placed in the Math Olympiad (details a little but fuzzy). The course was not competitive – kids helped each other – but it was really hard and really intense – it required a lot of work to understand and master the material and some kids just mastered it faster. I was really proud of the A- I received. I was told later that the course was legendary – a Stanford PhD in Operations Research said that course was known to be a one semester undergraduate course that covered the same material as a one year graduate course at Stanford. It worked because the professor was such an exceptional teacher. I loved the intensity and the depth of the learning. No complaints at all about the rigor even though I have not directly applied any of the material covered in eons. The fundamental understanding I took away was invaluable.
The courses I objected to were the ones that didn’t teach much. One of the courses I took to meet a literature requirement was a Shakespeare course, in which we read many plays (15?). The professor would act aloud from the plays in lectures. I don’t think I learned anything about how to write or how to analyze literature in the course. Some of the plays were magnificent (even that adjective does not give adequate praise to King Lear) but I also learned that Shakespeare could have used an editor to throw out some of the mediocre plays. Not enough learning for the work of reading one play a week and writing a number of papers. That seemed like lots of work and little rigor.
I took lots of rigorous courses, but can’t remember anything quite as rigorous as the aforementioned course, but I feel I learned a ton and recommended it others, but with a warning that it would be intense. That is the warning I would give to folks. It will be intense. Don’t go there if you don’t love intensity.
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Such questions can also be asked at the high school level. For example, IB diploma programs are widely seen as enormous amounts of work, but is the additional learning worth that amount of work?
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The IB Diploma was also designed for schools that are in session for many more days each year than American schools, and that has an enormous impact on the work load. But back to the topic…
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It does occur to me that students and teachers may define rigor in a way that is synonymous with workload. My own definition is tied much more to developing a fundamental understanding of the subjects and a mastery of the tools needed to master the subject. So, my Shakespeare course had a high workload but was anything but rigorous. The Game Theory and Mathematical Programming course was highly rigorous and had a high workload. I suspect that it is possible to have courses that are rigorous without having a high workload. I recall a graduate psychology course that I took where each week, we read a set of academic papers (all pretty short) and then talked through the experiments performed and the potential alternative explanations for the findings. I think we were working to both understand the experimental methods they were using and trying to connect in to underlying psychological phenomena. It felt rigorous to me (though many of the studies in the field were pretty sloppy) and was not that much work.
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Even within a subject, different courses could vary. For example, in computer science, courses with programming projects tend to be high workload, but rigor level can vary all over the place. The upper level theory courses have low workload in comparison, but are often high rigor (they resemble upper level math courses).
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I always wonder why someone will knowingly choose a school and then complain they don’t offer things they want.
It’s like going to McD and complain they don’t serve tacos and demand they change their menu.
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Agreed. Especially kids who, we can be certain, had outstanding credentials and could get in almost anywhere they wanted to go.