<p>^^^ Yes, $60K/year can be a lot of money, even for people who can afford it. People here like to talk about “missing the point of a liberal arts education”, so let them stay for the full four years if they can afford it, or are lucky enough to have enough financial aid. For those who don’t, CHOICE IS GOOD.</p>
<p>If you want a fixed, tired version of a liberal arts education, than Columbia or U Chicago are undeniably better.</p>
<p>Choice is definitely good. What is less good is when there are information deficits about (a) the availability of financial aid at elite liberal arts schools, and (b) the nature of the job market in some fields, which would rather hire an Ivy League grad with an English degree than a state school grad with a degree that is specific to the field.</p>
<p>OK, then, what fields would rather hire a Brown grad with an English degree (or another social science/humanities major) than a state school (or rather, non-elite school) grad with a degree that is specific to the field?</p>
<p>That’s too subjective to answer. I would certainly say though that my education was enriched by not having people forced into my classroom in the way Columbia or uchicago would.</p>
<p>Consulting, various types of professional services, academic administration, etc., etc.</p>
<p>@mgcsinc the UChicago and Columbia liberal arts Core methods may be old and traditional, but do not say they are “fixed” or “tired”. They revolve classical texts and themes but debate within my classes within the Core for humanities and civilization studies have extended into highly relevant matters of the modern world, we have stretched Aristotle’s view of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics to a debate on what friendship is now to us due to technology and connection through Facebook. We have talked about the political ramifications for laws and policies that were just made through analyzing the French Revolution in my civilizations course. These courses aren’t rigid and boring, they are enlightening and incredibly interesting if you are there, in class, debating the reasoning behind Rousseau’s The Social Contract or Dante’s Inferno. </p>
<p>@iwannabeBrown UChicago’s core requirements are offered in wide range of courses. The humanities requirements has 8 different themes (media and art, to greek thought and literature, to philosophy, language, culture), the Civilization Studies requirement has a great deal of choices, the Social Sciences requirement has a broad 5 categories. Anyone can find classes, even if they aren’t humanities folk, that they like and are interested in. People are “forced” into taking a certain requirement, but the specific class they take is up to them. Yes of course there are people who don’t like to Englishy courses, but they come to UChicago knowing the value of great comprehension and writing skills as well as the skills gained from all the other Core requirements. We willingly force ourselves into the courses of the Core because we know the benefit in them, so though some may be displeased towards certain classes they may not enjoy, they still know that being in that class is good for them. I’d easily say my education is enriched by the science students in my humanities courses, and the econ majors in my Civilizations course. In this way, the Core brings together students from all majors and ensures that all students are receiving a strong, liberal-arts education without any holes because someone doesn’t like a certain area.</p>
<p>^I respectfully disagree that the various capitalized phrases in that paragraph have much at all to do with any of the modern things that you mention in that paragraph. Also, they all relate to White European people. Also, I think they’re tired.</p>
<p>I knew Tufts had a core but, in that core, you have enough pieces in place to fill any holes that might arise, so perhaps Tufts’ core can deliver a solid liberal arts education. It does resemble a little what U Chicago or Columbia does, but one of the civilization courses must be about a non-Occidental one. Here’s Tufts’ core:</p>
<ul>
<li>1 English course</li>
<li>1 philosophy or 1 additional English course</li>
<li>3 foreign language courses </li>
<li>3 foreign culture courses (may be used on foreign language courses; Tufts defines a foreign culture as having non-English-speaking origins)</li>
<li>1 non-Western civilization course (can be used to fulfill a distribution requirement or a culture requirement)</li>
<li>2 mathematics courses (Math 4 can be one of the two if one scores 550 or less on the Math portion of the SAT or 22 or less on the Math portion of the ACT, which almost no Jumbo will have)</li>
<li>2 science courses</li>
<li>2 humanities courses</li>
<li>2 arts courses</li>
<li>2 social science courses</li>
</ul>
<p>IMO Tufts’ core isn’t tired by any means.</p>
<p>That’s not a core, that’s a distribution requirement. Distribution requirements have their own problems, and are either (a) so weak as to accomplish basically none of their goals, or (b) strong, but fixed in a way that means that the students of 2013 are educated according to 1960 (or 1980, or 2000)'s idea of a well-rounded person.</p>
<p>If you have some time, take a look at the criticisms of these types of curricula in [The</a> Magaziner-Maxwell Report](<a href=“http://books.google.com/books?printsec=frontcover&id=mfV2gJJ2n7kC#v=onepage&q&f=false]The”>http://books.google.com/books?printsec=frontcover&id=mfV2gJJ2n7kC#v=onepage&q&f=false).</p>
<p>I like a core curriculum and hoped my D would choose Columbia. Ultimately, she chose Penn which is far more specialized with liberal arts mixed in. I was worried about the freedom of Brown. It put me on edge because I thought she needed some structure. I don’t know though. Maybe I’m transferring my own issues to her.</p>
<p>@mrcsinc Thank you for your opinion, but I don’t have time to write out the discussion of friendship according to Aristotle concerning “living” with friends being active discussion with them or physical proximity to people and how this concerns the interconnectivity of people now through FB. I also don’t have time to state how the Three Orders of the Prerevolutionary France, the beginning of the French revolution as an aristicratic revolution against the sovereignty of the king, the formation of the National Assembly, and the debate of proper rights of citizens that developed within the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen applies to the debate about citizen rights in modern time.</p>
<p>Also, these courses (humanities and civilization) if we look past the content, are meant to give you skills working with source and original documents and analysis. They help you learn how to think, develop arguments, and discuss ideas even if the reading list is old and possibly outdated. Yes, some of these courses are mainly focused on Western documents but there are professors, like my own, Professor Leela Gandhi, who bring a strongly global context to them. And there are Core humanities courses that deal with other non-traditional canon like Media Aesthetics or Readings in World Literature or Language and the Human, I took a very traditional course called Human Being and Citizen. Also, my Civ course is History of European Civilization, so I clearly am focusing on Western Civilization in two of my Core courses.</p>
<p>These two courses are only a slice of the Core anyways, there is also Arts, Math, Physical Science, Biological Science, and Social Science. How are these requirements “tired”? They are all very much alive today. I am not afraid to say that your belief in the Core as tired holds no weight for me against the belief of the faculty of the University of Chicago of these courses as important and fundamental. I personally believe Brown’s open curriculum is great for some people, particularly those not looking for a well-rounded liberal-arts education. Though I do believe Brown gives guidelines for studying in a wide range of fields. To like Brown’s academic freedom does not mean you shouldn’t respect the Core courses of UChicago as important, also I’m sure Brown has many courses like UChicago’s in all fields that are required to be studied by Uchicago students.</p>
<p>On Brown’s website it states, " In addition to completing a concentration, you are expected to sample courses in the humanities, the social sciences, the life sciences, and the physical sciences. " Oh, that seems strangely like UChicago’s requirements for its liberal-arts Core. Brown wants its students to take the courses that UChicago has in its Core, so they are clearly important, but UChicago has a limited number of courses you can take to fulfill the requirement whereas maybe Brown let’s you take any course within the general fields. Brown lets it students choose their courses, UChicago simply chooses the options you, as a student, can pick from.</p>
<p>PAGrok,</p>
<p>the fact that you keep returning to your individual courses shows that you don’t really get what this debate is about although your last post does finally show some glimmers: “UChicago simply chooses the options you, as a student, can pick from.” This is the fundamental problem that attracts many students to Brown. I preferred to pick my own courses. I am an individual with my own academic interests, pursuits, and ambitions. I wanted and chose an institution that trusted me as an individual to build my own curriculum which I don’t see as having any holes that distribution requirements or a core would have changed. I do see how having such requirements would have severely hampered by academic pursuits and self-value as a scholar. I understand that many don’t believe an 18-22 year old should have such freedom but thankfully I did not end up at such an institution. You obviously didn’t want such freedom and I disagree with mgcsinc that there is something inherently “wrong” with that but please acknowledge that you felt the need to surrender control of your education. There are certain areas of my life where I am willing to surrender control but my education wasn’t one of them.</p>
<p>^It wasn’t my intention to imply that there is something “wrong” with choosing a core curriculum. In other posts here, I’ve made it clear that I think that Brown plays an important role as part of an ecosystem of curricular alternatives available to college applicants. If a college applicants thoughtfully compares the curricula and decides that s/he prefers a particular core, then s/he’s made exactly the kind of self-directed choice about education that I find so great. Most people disagree with my personal views about the problems with core curricula, and I understand that.</p>
<p>What I was articulating was my own strongly-held views, which led to my choosing Brown. I believe that core curricula like Chicago’s perpetuate a mythology about the cultural significance of a small slice of White, European culture, and that they lead students to believe that they are well-rounded because they have been fed a set of courses chosen by generations past; that’s why I chose Brown.</p>
<p>PAGRok: There are millions of courses that could accomplish the same goals that you’ve identified. There’s nothing special about Chicago’s core other than that it chooses some rather (in my opinion) tired and dry ways of getting there.</p>
<p>If I was forced to design my own core curriculum from scratch, it would be heavy on mind and brain science, which I see as fundamental to understanding who we are. But I don’t see anyone implementing that anytime soon.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Sorry for the misunderstanding mgcsinc. I obviously agree with what you’ve said to clarify.</p>
<p>4thfloor,</p>
<p>I meant to respond to you but never did. You are right that choice is good but since no one is forcing anyone to go to brown, brown doesn’t need to offer the choice of a 3 year degree. As you said, if one cannot afford brown or cannot get enough aid they are free to choose to attend one of the 4000 other institutions of higher learning.</p>
<p>^^^ and if you don’t like <whatever> here, leave the country, right?</whatever></p>
<p>Since when have we turned into a country of fascists telling everyone else what’s good for them, or else go somewhere else?</p>
<p>If you think my statement is fascist then I’m pretty sure you don’t understand what fascism is.</p>
<p>We have 4000 institutions of higher learning with various standards, policies, and prices. It would be far more destructive to force all of them to be the same than to allow students to pick the institution that best aligns with their goals. I really don’t think it’s so radical to say that if you don’t like what brown stands for dont go there, or go and try to change it but don’t be upset when no one agrees. No one has the “right” to a 3 year education or certainly an education at brown.</p>
<p>@mgcsinc I truly don’t understand why Chicago’s core curriculum reinforces the dominance of White European culture? The science part of the core does not, the arts part of the core does not, the math part of the core does not, the civilizations studies part of the core does not (you can study many non-european civilizations), the humanities part of the core does not (most of the Hume courses do not involve classical Western canon), and the Social Sciences part of the core has 3/5 core classes with a classical reading list. Also, I still don’t understand what courses in the Core are “tired and dry”. I’m not trying to upset you, I’m genuinely curious as to your distaste for the Core. Is it the areas of study that you don’t like? or the core courses offered within each area that you find dull? You said your ideal core would focus on “mind and brain science”, what classes are those? Psych courses? Neurobiology courses? humanities courses that develop thought? </p>
<p>@iwannabebrown I took that to mean that if Brown creates a 3 year degree then more people could have the option to go to Brown, and everyone deserves an equal opportunity to attend Brown, or any place they want. No one has the right to an education at Brown, but everyone has the right to an equal ability to attend Brown, and a 3 year program would allow more people who cannot afford Brown to attend. I didn’t know that Brown “stands for” a 4 year education, and really it seems to be standing for whatever education the students feels is necessary for them. Possibly some students want a 3 year education, and if that is what would be best for them, then I’m surprised Brown wouldn’t let them do that. Brown allows students control over their education, shouldn’t it allow them to choose to take classes for only 3 years? Why does a 4 year education automatically mean you have accomplished the ideal goal and are ready to graduate? Who determined at what point you have taken enough classes and why is it 4 years, not 5 or 6, or not 3? I should probably look up the history of higher education in this country to find the answer though, and it seems like other countries are more likely to have shorter years to graduate for various reasons (different K-12 system, more specialized focus in college, etc).</p>
<p>Pagrock,</p>
<p>Unless you are advocating a straight lottery system for brown you do not believe that everyone should have an equal opportunity to attend. Anything other than a random lottery does not give everyone an equal opportunity.</p>
<p>You are right that 4 years is somewhat arbitrary but so is the number of classes needed to prove proficiency. Brown does offer freedom from the traditional 4 year plan. I had one friend who went part time his final year and did an internship and another friend who had taken enough coursework that she could have spent a semester away working, not doing courses and still graduate in 4 years total. The brown experience is not limited strictly to the classroom though and that’s also part of why it restricts how quickly a student can get out.</p>
<p>And there is a program that does require 5 years: the ScB/AB. That was what I wanted to do but I didn’t want to spend 5 years so while I took the same courses I decided to forgo the proper AB on my diploma.</p>