My kids weren’t specifically looking for pressure filled, but WERE looking for academic rigor and intensity.
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D26 wants to study engineering and classics so Brown’s open curriculum really appealed to her and made her ED choice easy.
It was a major reason she picked the school but we didnt investigate other schools that also offered it.
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- Curricular style (open; core; “standard” w/ some distribution requirements, but plenty of options to fulfill them)
- Calendar (semesters, trimesters, quarters)
- Academic vibe (pre-professional vs. intellectual, competitive vs. collaborative, etc.)
- Social vibe (campus-based vs. city-based culture, greek scene, sports scene, overall party scene, club scene, etc.)
- Access to activities (skiing, surfing, hiking, biking, camping, etc.)
- Access to professors
- Classroom dynamics (often a result of class size)
- Dining options and quality
- Housing culture, options, quality
- Study-abroad programs
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I don’t think the list of truly open curriculum schools is that long. You are right that it should be easy to do, but not many schools do it. That may be in large part a philosophical choice by most schools. They want their students to be required to take courses in a broad array of disciplines in order to get a degree. Imposing a liberal arts breath requirement on all.
And, when you pair Brown’s grading system which allows unlimited pass fail, with the open curriculum with no requirements outside one’s major, it starts to get pretty unique.
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My DD created Instagram area for accepted students. From inactivity and what students posted she eliminated one of front runners. Everyone has different set of requirements. Dd had her own strange set. We were looking for a school with later hours for food, access to local religious group and horseback riding. Believe it or not she is using all but food (cooks for herself mostly) items from her list. She is doing horseback riding and actively participate with religious community. So these criteria were very important to her. And not being in pressure school was another one. We live in very competitive area and constant pressure was nonstop through HS and even MS. She often felt a bit insecure in that environment. She wanted to be premed but not in class of 300 with top 50 studying around the clock. So we were looking for small schools and school in South that she attends fits her needs. She is always in top 5% of her class, but she has a life outside of classes. She also now finally gained confidence. All kids study hard but it is very different from our area where students study during summer to learn material ahead of time with nonstop bragging about their achievements and EC…
Another criteria we had is to avoid foreign language. She managed to test out of FL in her school. That was 3 semesters of FL.
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Opposites here. Our kids and we wanted schools with a strong core course requirement. We all agreed that taking courses in disciplines outside of their main interests was a good thing. Both really liked their core courses, and spread them out over the four years.
BUT this was not a criteria for choosing a college.
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I think one of the most overlooked things is ease of changing major, and whether there’s a secondary process to be accepted into the major. I think it’s easy to be 100% confident that you’re absolutely, positively, positive when you’re 16-17 looking at and applying to schools. But the reality is there is a ton of information they simply don’t have yet. I understand the difficulty in dealing with overwhelming numbers in large schools but do wish more kids had flexibility on that front.
Ease of travel - mine wanted either direct flights or good proximity to the airport. Some of the early options were pretty painful to get home.
ETA - no foreign language requirement was on my son’s list. Ironically, he ended up learning another language by choice, but in high school was sure he never wanted to take another foreign language class.
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My house is split. I was all in on open curriculum, D26 very much wanted a core of some sort. My view was, I had so many interests and there are so many topics I was not exposed to in HS, I did not want to be forced to take more courses in areas I already knew (eg, I did AP Calculus in HS and did not think the best use of my time with first rate professors was more math). Ended up doing an interdisciplinary major with classes from a number of departments for that. Even with the open curriculum I still felt like there was not enough space to explore everything I was interested in (wanted to take geology, and art history and never got around to them, sign language was a hope that never happened).
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The possibility of driving the whole way at least once at the beginning of the experience and once more at the end, and if fights are needed at all a direct nonstop flight with no intermediate airports or change of planes. Up here in the northeast when going back and forth around Christmas and New Years it is iffy enough to find no snow at either beginning and ending locations, without having to also hope for no snow at some intermediate airport.
If you have open, you can still create the semblance of a core. So maybe those schools should not be eliminated.
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I said that exact thing to D26! She still was not interested. That’s ok though, I love her list for her.
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Seems like the top fit factors for any student would be:
- Is it affordable?
- Does it have the desired academic majors and programs? For undecided students, does it have any of the possible majors and programs of interest? Are the desired or possible academic majors and programs gated by a secondary admission process, and how difficult is that?
- (If making an application list, as opposed to choosing between admissions) Is it realistic for admission, including any needed scholarship for affordability and admission to major if applicable?
It also depends on how one defines “open curriculum”.
The most open curriculum probably belongs to the BA degree at The Evergreen State College, where the graduation requirements are 180 quarter credits (= 120 semester credits, the usual BA/BS amount), with no general education or major requirements.
However, most other “open curriculum” schools at least require a major. They may also limit the percentage of courses in any one department or division.
Some stretch the definition of “open curriculum” to include schools that (for example) require three courses in each of humanities, social science, and natural science. If we use that definition, then the number of “open curriculum” schools becomes significantly larger.
With respect to general education requirements or core curricula, some (perhaps many) colleges allow students to use AP credit in math to fulfill, or take more advanced or other quantitative courses instead for, the math or quantitative reasoning part of the requirements. Similar is often true with respect to foreign languages.
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I do not think of that as an open curriculum, but I recognize others may disagree. Even if one does, it is a very different model than the Brown one discussed earlier and much more proscriptive. It would have been significantly less appealing to me, and I suspect some others as well.
I almost knew after I wrote AP math, someone would point out AP credit to fulfill requirements. I should have changed the example. That my math was AP was not the crux of it for me, I would have wanted to be done with math even if I hadn’t taken AP calculus. For me, I didn’t want them forcing me to take classes I did not feel would add as much to my education in lieu of others I felt would add more. It probably had more to do with autonomy and ownership of my own education than anything else. That said, having major requirements didn’t bother me in the same way, but maybe it would for an Evergreen student. One of the best things about the US college system in my view is that there are so many different permutations.
What I described is University of Rochester requirements. For some reason, University of Rochester is commonly called “open curriculum” here, even though its requirements are more like typical distribution requirements.
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If you are doing an ABET engineering major, I am not sure how Brown’s curriculum is substantially different from other schools?
It may not be. But she’s not 100% sure she wants to do engineering. She definitely wants to study classics. I think the open curriculum (and Brown’s grading system) gives her options and opportunities to try difficult classes without the grade pressure.
She went through the entire college admissions process herself. As soon as we visited, she wanted to go there. We actually visited twice, once with D24. As kids say, it was the “vibe”.
D24 liked it too but she really wanted to get out of New England.
Because the articles on open curriculum call it that along with Grinnell, Hamilton, Kalamazoo and more.
And Rochester doesn’t show data nothing to dissuade it.
Brown gathers data every few years on the choices that graduates have made re: course selection and typically discovers (surprise surprise) that most students essentially recreate some form of distribution requirement, while fulfilling their own departmental requirements. A student majoring in Art History but who intends to apply to med school fulfills the med school requirements (so knocks off the science and math courses in addition to the deep dive into Art History) but may also end up with foreign languages (French, Italian, etc.) depending on what the focus is in Art History. So practically speaking- distribution requirements fulfilled.
Academic departments set their own standards for their major requirements, Open Curriculum or not. And although there are MANY interdisciplinary majors, that usually means more requirements, not fewer.
Rochester does require you to take courses in certain clusters and 3 in each of the 3 buckets if memory serves..the courses in the clusters have to follow a theme
On tour/info session, I was really turned off by their non-stop discussion of the uniqueness of Rochester’s open curriculum, but as noted, when you get in the weeds, it felt little different than many/most schools, and honestly… in some ways felt less flexible than some schools since the clusters had to be themed.
Of note, if you were engineering there were fewer requirements.
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