Brown ABET accredited engineering majors do require some humanities and social science courses, since that is a requirement for ABET accreditation. But Brown has fewer (4) than other schools like MIT (8) or Harvey Mudd (11) (and the latter two require both distribution across H/SS subjects and depth to upper level courses in one subject).
4 HSS seems pretty normal compared to other engineering schools my kids considered (mostly publics). MIT and Mudd have a more extensive core curriculum than the typical public.
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My engineering major kid had no trouble at all taking 8 core course requirements. And 3 required courses in religion (150 courses in religion and ethics to choose from). And more…my kid, as mentioned someplace on this forum, really liked the break from all the STEM courses she was required to take. She said some of her core courses were really terrific.
At her college, you had to take core courses, but you could choose from a pretty large menu in each discipline.
Sooo… back to the question.. what makes schools different. As some have said- size, geographic location, public vs private, urban vs rural, housing requirements , Greek or no Greek, course requirements, class sizes, etc. the gut “can I see myself here?” Is a good differentiator too.
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Not sure I saw above (but may be there)
How competitive certain clubs are.
This was not a thing (or at least not that I was aware of beyond frats) when I went ot college, but at quite a few schools, certain clubs are very exclusive now, though not all. That is a turn-off for me personally and has been a non-issue so far for my kids (who aren’t interested in such clubs to date).
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I wonder what kind of tie in there might be to this and intensity or competitive vs collaborative. There must be at some level. I would hate this too for my kids. Clubs should be open or equal access.
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it isn’t unreasonable for the university orchestra to have a high bar and a tryout process. Kids who either don’t want to devote that much time– or can’t reach the bar- can play in many of the other performance groups. Similarly, university-wide debate teams (which often have both undergrad and grad students), swim teams, etc. likely cannot accommodate “walk on’s”. This isn’t reflective of how competitive (or non-collaborative) the educational experience is- it just reflects the fact that there is room for the enthusiastic participant as well as the highly skilled– and a tryout process is the vehicle for determining that.
Do you think Stanford (generally described as a highly collaborative educational environment) should let any casual “I love this sport” onto one of the teams which has Olympic-caliber athletes? That doesn’t make it non-collaborative!
There’s one club that was mentioned at 80% of our tours.
“We have so many clubs, we even have a Taylor Swift club” …
It’s probably the most ubiquitous club in higher education.
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Agree, related for sure! I think the club thing is symptomatic of it, good point.
I don’t think anyone is talking about sports teams being all walk-ons.
That said, I actually think debate teams should have levels - no reason schools like Stanford don’t have enough resources to have JV or fun level debate clubs..
Many schools now have three layers (or more) of interviews and other requirements to gain admission to a special-interest business club. These aren’t teams. THAT is what I was referring to and I think Blossom was too. Penn (I think?) just had to regulate the # of rounds of interviews clubs could hold.
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I am not a fan of organizations with selective membership (I’m not talking about ones requiring skill) and I don’t personally care for Greek life even though some sororities or fraternities may have a focus on social/community service , there is still the selectivity component that I don’t care for. Same goes for private clubs and eating clubs. They strike me as elitist.
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Students believe the competitive business clubs are “meaningful”. Employers believe otherwise. To each his or her own.
An employer looking for evidence of creativity, ability to think out of the box, etc. is likely going to be more impressed with a student who performed with an improv group (these are typically non-competitive) or a “Saturday Night Standup Comedy Club” (again, non-competitive although the audience can be brutal!).
Y’know what my colleagues in recruiting love? The kids who see a problem, fix the problem. THAT’S a “business mindset” more than a club. The kid who set up a meeting with the heads of procurement and dining services to introduce a plan to reduce plastic waste in the university’s kitchens. The kid who re-engineered the town’s food pantry to provide more fresh food and fewer boxes of Mac and Cheese (where should an unhoused person heat up a box of Mac and Cheese?). The kid who reconfigured the housing lottery to make it operate like the Match Day system for medical residents, instead of the existing program which created winners and losers.
But a kid wants three rounds of interviews to “make it” to a club which practices case interviews to solve business problems (which the companies have already solved btw….). Have at it.
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I wasn’t talking about competitive teams but some clubs limit and there is no competition. Then again Greek life does this too.
Someone is paying $90k. Does a business club really need to say no ?
The person you describe above is not a reality in 99.9% of cases.
I was simply wondering if that might be tied into intensity etc which is subjective anyway. We have one poster, we think at Columbia ( or Cal Tech) who says he is bored.
Two people can see the same situation differently in regard to rigor but also competitiveness.
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right? so true.
If you are at a top 20 (or the like) and you can’t figure out how to practice case questions or network on your own…you may not have the attitude or creativity they are looking for IMO.
Maybe I am missing something with these clubs, I am not in the recruiting world of these places (though did go through corporate recruiting way back when). It just seems like they are creating fake scarcity because a certain group of kids miss the “chase” of trying to get into colleges and need an interim “chase” of getting into clubs before internships/job hunts start?
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That’s my understanding at some colleges. Here’s an article about Yale’s competitive club culture - Students enter yet another cycle of competitive club applications - Yale Daily News
ETA and to stay on topic: Competitiveness of the school around clubs/grades is a reason D26 chose not to apply to some schools, so another way to differentiate colleges.
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Here’s what I said about clubs that are exclusive earlier in the thread. For D26 it was tied to both competitive vs cooperative and whether kids are interested in learning for the love of learning vs for grades, awards and external validation.
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Based on my own experiences interviewing– so don’t spam me please, I’m not generalizing…
It’s less about false scarcity and more about the increasing drive towards pre-professionalism. How can you join the swing dancing club when you should be practicing DCF? How do you explain to your parents that you decided to spend your free time singing madrigals with original instrument accompaniment rather than practice interviewing (even though you are only a first semester freshman)? Those madrigal singers don’t even wear suits for god’s sake… they perform in britches and muslin tunics…
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I take it from your prior post that the students are wrong about this in your view. That they should join the Swing dance group or sing in britches and tunics. If that is right, then the follow-up questions it raises for me are: are these schools doing enough to help these (presumably smart) students to see that? If so, why do the students persist in this attitude? If not, what more should they do on this?
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I don’t think they are ‘wrong”, I think they believe that doing something “business oriented” instead of something artistic or just enjoyable will give them a leg up for getting a job after college.
I don’t believe this is on the college. Campuses now host hundreds of student groups with everything from “We love to bake fancy pastry” to “We run clothing drives for the unhoused”. Every campus tour touts the fact that if you have an interest- prepare a one paragraph summary and the Dean of Student Activities of whatever they call it will get you funding to start your own club. What more can colleges do than provide meeting space, performance venues, faculty advisors if necessary and funds for every conceivable interest?
Some students think that an hour spent on something not career oriented is a waste of time. We’ve got kids and parents posting here constantly that they can’t consider College A because it has a writing requirement and “you don’t need to write to become a civil engineer”. Which most civil engineers will tell you is absolutely not true.
So the kids who want to learn how to laminate croissants will have their own club, and the kids who want to practice case interviewing will discover that there are so many kids who want to join that club, that it’s now a competitive process to join. Gatekeeping.
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Got it. I think I misread read your prior post on interviewing to say what you all in business world care about are not the things that these business clubs provide so it was not the best use of these students time to be in these clubs if the purpose was to get an edge to get a job.
I also may have been making a general assumption (based on others posts, not yours I don’t think), that the competitiveness level and impact on some students of not getting into these exclusive business clubs has been a problem for some of the schools, resulting in new rules about interviews, etc. That part of my question (which in hindsight was unfair to direct to you) was about the notion that there are often hundreds of clubs as you note, but the over focus on these competitive view is having outsized negative consequences - for those who are obsessed with getting in to the exclusion of other things for little gain, psychologically for those who don’t get in, and for all the other activities that lose good participants due to misplaced pre-professional obsession. It was that assumption of mine (which may actually be a dead wrong misunderstanding) that was behind the question of what should colleges do about it.