Should Brown offer a 3-year BA/BS?

Catria
Sun, 27 Jan 2013 12:13:33 +0000

Sometimes I wonder why non-elite schools chose not to emulate Brown’s model, which has a near-complete (the only constraints are the prereqs of the upper-level courses but doing away with the prereqs on upper-level courses will do students no good whatsoever) academic freedom, since there often seem to lack coherence in courses used to fulfill distribution requirements. In schools with that much academic liberty, adcoms would still have to build a class with the intended majors in mind, but what are the main concerns of having that much academic liberty?

BTW, if I had to choose between Columbia, U Chicago or Tufts as an undergrad, which have hefty distribution requirements (Columbia and U Chicago have cores while Tufts doesn’t have one) I’d rather go with Tufts since the distribution requirements seem to make more sense today than Columbia or U Chicago.