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<p>Fine, so this is just a venue of entertainment for you, rather than a forum of serious discussion. Fair enough, at least we now know where you stand. </p>
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<p>Fair enough - then ask yourself why are a strong majority (~60%) of UM applicants rejected, if not for a lack of space? While I can agree that some of the rejectees are simply not qualified and would have failed at UM, surely there are plenty of rejectees who would have successfully passed and graduated. {Maybe not with top grades, but they would have graduated.} </p>
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<p>Actually, if you are correct, then that only makes my proposal even more feasible. If they represent only a tiny fraction of the number of students who haven’t graduated by 4 years, then it would be trivial for UM - with its vast financial resources - to provide stop-gap financing for them to complete their additional majors. </p>
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<p>Seems to me that you’re now even more supportive of my proposal. </p>
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<p>Um, exactly how is it useless? You said it yourself - it’s a bachelor’s degree, no more and - here’s the key - no less useful than the generic liberal arts bachelor’s degrees being handed out now. Let’s face it - UM (and most other universities) hand out boatloads of generic liberal arts bachelor’s degrees. </p>
<p>The value is therefore quite clear: you now have a bachelor’s degree which allows you to compete for the increasing number of jobs or professional school placements (i.e. law/med-school) that require or heavily value bachelor’s degrees. That gives you the flexibility to move forward with your career. If a great job or professional-school placement is available for the taking at year 4, you could take that. Otherwise, you could stay to finish the complete program. </p>
<p>But at least you now have the option. Without that option, you’re truly locked into your program for a complete 5 years. What if you discover by year 4 that you don’t actually want to be an architect anymore? Under the current system, too bad, you still don’t have a degree so you’re locked into your fifth year. But this interim degree allows you to leave while still giving you a degree in 4 years. Sure, it’s a generic degree, but it’s still a degree. </p>
<p>And besides, it seems to me that such a policy would only serve to enhance the efficiency of the labor market by improving the signalling power of those who complete the full-blown professional degree. Right now, there are numerous engineering graduates who don’t actually want to work as engineers, and surely there must be plenty of BArch graduates who don’t actually really want to work as architects. The interim degree would allow these students to leave the program early, and with a degree, thereby preserving the accredited professional degree for only those people who actually intend to pursue those careers. </p>
<p>You keep talking about these degrees as if they are ‘useless’, but they’re surely no more useless (and almost certainly more valuable) than the generic new liberal arts bachelor’s degrees being generated by the hundreds of thousands every year. Yet you’re not proposing that all of those programs be abolished for their uselessness (or are you?). So if you’re not prepared to abolish those programs, then what’s so outrageous about an interim unaccredited engineering or architecture degree? </p>
<p>The real problem is that too many employers and professional schools demand that you have a degree. They don’t really care what type of degree it is, they don’t really care if the degree program really taught you anything, all they care about is that you have a degree. If you don’t have one, they won’t care why. All they will see is that you lack a degree. As silly as that requirement may be, unfortunately those employers and prof-schools are never going to stop demanding degrees. Hence, we might as well give those 5-year engineering/architecture students that interim degree so that, at least, they can compete for those jobs after 4 years. Right now, they can’t even do that. </p>
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<p>Right, the payscale figures that deliberately excludes all students - which is almost surely the majority at Harvard, but not at UM - who never go on to graduate school. Never mind that one of the key attractions of attending Harvard for undergrad is that - because of its strong research resources, brand-name, and grade inflation - it serves as one of the premiere launching pads in the world for admission to grad school, often times back at Harvard itself. For example, generally speaking, the largest cohort at HMS, HLS, HBS, or many Harvard academic graduate programs is from Harvard itself. {For example, I think there was one recent year where the majority of all the new Harvard economics grad students who attended US undergrad programs came from… Harvard College. And every year, on average about 10-15% of all graduating Harvard MBA’s had undergrad degrees from…Harvard College. It is for that reason that Harvard is often times said to be the most incestuous school in the country - as it certainly seems that the easiest way to be admitted to Harvard grad school and later to even be hired as faculty at Harvard is to go there as an undergrad and just stay there.}</p>
<p>Yet sadly Payscale excludes all of those students, which means that - in the case of Harvard and other schools where most of the undergrads will attend graduate school - the Payscale figures tend to measure only the relatively least ambitious and probably least qualified of the graduates. {For example, if you graduated with a 2.1 GPA from Harvard, you’re probably not going to graduate school.}</p>