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The college bubble

They also tend to be need blind so those who get in and cannot afford it, go for free.

I agree, but the fact that many Europeans get an incentive "paycheck" to do a PhD encourages many to pursue a PhD. The salaries are definitely not abysmal as in US. In Switzerland EPFL pays you around 50k swiss francs/annum. The German universities pay around 1600-2000 euros/month (tax-free) -equivalent to 40-45k gross euros. Similarly, in Norway PhDs are pad close to 60k euros. The results can easily be seen. Germany produces 3 times more doctorates in Engineering/100k than America. As a result, Germany has (almost) same number of Engineering doctorates. Same for many other countries, such as Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway.

This ensures that many more students who enter the work-force are much more mature, patient (PhD), and enter a job-field for the long run, rather than for making the quick buck. Also, the work-force, as a result of being better educated, is much more productive and innovative. Last time I checked, each of those countries were growing 3-4% with an ever ever appreciating Euro and Swiss Franc. It also ensures that their jobs just cannot be outsourced as easily as those in America, because at high density of population, coupled with extremely high number of PhD/100k and local language (German/French/Dutch), it is much easier to find qualified and productive work-force in those countries than in ,say India or China.
 
http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/tuition/

$2,400 a semester/ 5K per year. 20K all in for an UG degree at Baruch, a solid university in NYC where there are countless job opportunities.

How is 20K for a 4 year degree expensive?

http://www.admissions.ucla.edu/prospect/budget.htm

~$40K for a UCLA undergrad. In one of the most expensive states in the union. The ROI on 40K of education is phenomenal.

http://www.admissions.duke.edu/faq/indexf222.html?iQuestionID=526 &iCategoryID=0

160K for a Duke degree. They meet 100% of financial aid for those in need. If you are a NC resident you can get grants, scholarships and aid.

Good schools, different price points, individual choice.

I never wanted to refute that some good universities do offer aid or good cheap education, but the fact is that a large majority don't. Also, one has, then, to make compromises. So the comment that the
The Ivy league schools in the USA are arguably the best if not on par with the best around the world.

They also tend to be need blind so those who get in and cannot afford it, go for free.

is refuted, as all the cheap education,almost always, comes from state universities and not from ivy league (private) universities.
 
I think people are confusing better with "teach better". The education you get at most schools will be on par with top schools. I mean c'mon, history is history, math is math. The difference is that a degree from Harvard is known around the world as a sign of quality. The best professors want to be there, the best students want to go there, on and on. This is why it is better.

There are differences. Not at the level of, say, courses on calculus, linear algebra, and elementary ODEs but at a more sophisticated level. Yike Lu wrote a post on this earlier in this thread that was bang on target. First-tier schools will have stronger upper-division and graduate courses than the second-tier ones. For example, both first-tier and second-tier may have an undergrad course called "Introduction to Abstract Algebra"; the difference is that in the first-tier school, the text used will be something like Dummit and Foote; in the second tier it will be Michael Artin's book, or the one by Gallian, with Dummit and Foote being used as a grad-level text. At the grad level, there will be strong courses in areas like Galois cohomology or complex manifolds -- courses that will either be absent in the second-tier schools or not taught properly. My contention is that strong French and German universities will be able to compete with MIT and CalTech at this level of teaching.

A Timex tells better time than a Rolex, yet having and owning a Rolex is a lot different than a Timex. And yes, I realize this statement will get a bunch of snarky responses, but the fact is, in general, the Rolex signals quality where as the timex signals maybe utilitarian functionality.

That, alas, is very true. I bought a Timex two years ago for $45 and it stopped working two weeks back. I've had to buy another Timex. The quality of a Rolex is something else altogether. By the way, why would a Timex tell better time? A Rolex is a chronometer (I think).
 
All mechanical watches have +/- issues. Springs fade, movements get our of whack, etc. Timex is far more precise.

France is well known for having some of the best mathematics based education.

This isn't at you BBW, but more so overall because I think this thread is boiling down to a US vs Everyone else thing when it comes to education. My stance is simply that Harvard is "better" because of the brand it built up. Much like Timex tells better time, but Rolex gets all the love.

I agree that at the highest level, you see a difference, but when it comes to educating people at a 4 year UG level, I think it is fair to say you will learn just as well at most schools, generally speaking. Yes, at Caltech your fellow students will be more driven, probably brighter, etc, but even at a local state school you will still be learning from PhD's who know their stuff. It also depends on the student. You might get a slightly watered down experience at a lesser state school, but you are also free to see the professor, take higher level classes, etc. I don't think a MFE from Baruch is deficient when compared to a MIT MFE, etc.

As for Europe paying more for PhD students and the work for benefiting, I really think the poster is stretching this logic. Europe could be outsourced tomorrow, if not for strict labor laws and protective measure. Personally, I am not passing judgement on this practice. We all do it to an extent. The US stepped in to protect US auto manufacturing, the steel market, farmers, on and on. Europe does it a little more towards the manufacturing side.

Then again, I could argue that Europe has more of a history of skilled manufacturing whereas the USA has historically been an unskilled manufacture (think Ford vs BMW/ think Tiger tank vs. Sherman). In fact, right now, the USA needs skilled machinists and laborers.

Villanova is a Catholic University and they had an ethics seminar I went to once. They talked about the Catholic investment policy and being against companies that outsourced. I felt the need to comment in class. Most Americans hate outsourcing, but if you look back in time, the USA was the China of Europe. Is it truly fair, on a globally ethical system, to keep low skill manufacturing jobs in the USA, when we have enjoyed that labor for a long time. We've moved up the curve. We went from agrarian, to industrial, to information to service based. It is only natural that other nations will advance along with us. Yes, there is exploitation going on in China and India, but the Chinese are not forced to do this work. If the interior of China was so great and farming so lucrative, no one would be fighting to work in a factory. Just as the Irish, Italians and Germans worked long hours in dangerous working environments, so do the Chinese, Bangladeshi's, Vietnamese.

In 50 years we will look back and see a China with increased wages, an increased middle class, hopefully more cleaner energy and less coal, more service and information than pure manufacturing (seeing this now). And this will be because the USA and other nations were not selfish.

I mean what right do I have, as an American, to make $15-20.00 an hour, doing a job that requires no real skill? I have free public education, freedom to learn, cheap or low cost universities, libraries, on and on. China doesn't have these things. India doesn't have these things. If I fail, with all the opportunity that I have, here, it is my fault. Why should I prohibit someone from China or India from enjoying the chance to earn a living, in the same way my ancestors did, through manual labor and effort.

Protectionism is simply selfish behavior. Yeah, it benefits companies, but it also benefits people around the world. I mean one of the first things communist China and Russia did was move from agrarian to industrial. This is how you employ people, produce things.
 
I was going to post something, but then my spiel got deleted. Here's a shortened version.

It's not accurate to say that the education is only marginally better. You start with better students, so you teach them more advanced material, and the gains are not simply linear, but they compound over time as all the course material builds on previous material/skills. For mediocre students, this difference is in fact detrimental because they will struggle to keep up.

Whether or not this helps in getting a job is another matter. For the average corporate job, a smart kid will do better going to a good public university because of the people skills he would develop and because of the recognition of being "the best" in a given set. The smart kid will be tops and make it look easy... freeing up time to socialize and do other activities.

For quant finance the story is different. For research/academia, the story is DRASTICALLY different.

The flip side of this is, if the kid doesn't have any other activities or the desire to socialize, he/she will feel completely underwhelmed by the whole experience. Naturally, this kind of person would steer towards academia and would be well served at an Ivy League or one of the two Techs.
 
For example, both first-tier and second-tier may have an undergrad course called "Introduction to Abstract Algebra"; the difference is that in the first-tier school, the text used will be something like Dummit and Foote; in the second tier it will be Michael Artin's book, or the one by Gallian, with Dummit and Foote being used as a grad-level text.

Slightly off-topic, but Gallian is a perfect text for a first course in Algebra, regardless of where you're learning it. Are 1st-tier schools expecting their math majors to have already taken AA in high school these days or something?
 
Slightly off-topic, but Gallian is a perfect text for a first course in Algebra, regardless of where you're learning it. Are 1st-tier schools expecting their math majors to have already taken AA in high school these days or something?

Continuing off-topic, Gallian is "AA for the not-too-bright." It's like an earlier text by Fraleigh but doesn't even go so far. Cosets are in Ch.8; the Sylow theorems and an all-too-brief 12-page intro to Galois theory have been shunted to the last section on special topics. For ambitious and able undergrads -- starting from scratch -- I'd use either Dummit and Foote's AA or Rotman's "Advanced Modern Algebra," which also start from the beginning but move at a fast trot, assume greater maturity and industry on the part of the student and have (at least Rotman does) more challenging problems. The same differences in texts can be found in complex analysis, topology, linear algebra, and so on. That's the difference (to my mind) between first-tier and second-tier. So even while the courses may have the same or similar titles, the texts being used, the material being covered, the pace, and the problems can be markedly different. Imperial and Swampwater U both have intro undergrad courses on mechanics -- but the Imperial course starts (or used to) with Lagrangian and Hamiltonian dynamics; Oxford and Swampwater both have intro analysis courses -- but Oxford begins (or used to) with Lebesgue integration.
 
I also find it funny that student loans are vilified now, but years ago only the rich could afford to attend school. Now everyone has access to school funding and now THAT is a problem. If everything was made free tomorrow, people would still find something to complain about. Maybe that effort should be focused on educating oneself and making informed decisions.

I think you are generalizing here. I'm personally not against students loans, but I think stricter criteria needs to be in place on who gets them.
As you said above "there is no free lunch" - if the government gives loans to people who can not pay them back, and does not do the due diligence, in a manner that you would expect from say a bank, that is a problem.
Why, because it is Federal tax dollars being used (and abused) in this manner, which means when it gets screwed up, it's those of us who pay tax who get left carrying the can, or "paying for the free lunch".

Also, when you say "Europe" do you mean the EU, or the continent in general. The situation from country to country is often vastly different.
For example:

Europe could be outsourced tomorrow

That is what has happened in the UK, a European nation.

Protectionism is simply selfish behavior.

I totally agree, and it is ultimately counter productive and never benefits the man on the street in the long run.
 
I also find it funny that student loans are vilified now, but years ago only the rich could afford to attend school. Now everyone has access to school funding and now THAT is a problem.
If you replace "student loan" with "mortgage loan" and throw in "liar loan/no doc loan", it will mirror perfectly the fiasco of the housing crash. It's essentially the point about "College Inc" documentary and this thread.
It's mentioned that for-profit college has 10% of all students in the country but 50% of all student loan default. Whatever the outcome, you and I are the tax-payers who foot the bill.
 
Continuing off-topic, Gallian is "AA for the not-too-bright."
>:-(

For ambitious and able undergrads -- starting from scratch -- I'd use either Dummit and Foote's AA or Rotman's "Advanced Modern Algebra," which also start from the beginning but move at a fast trot, assume greater maturity and industry on the part of the student and have (at least Rotman does) more challenging problems.

I suppose that would be consistent with practices at places like Harvard and MIT where the Intro Analysis students get flung unceremoniously into Rudin and are, I guess, expected to find historical motivation and less mysterious proofs on their own. I still believe that DF has way too much detail for a first study in Algebra, at least for self-study.
 
I still believe that DF has way too much detail for a first study in Algebra, at least for self-study.

Oh, I agree. DF was (is?) used for the intro course in AA at Chicago. It needs an adept lecturer to point out what's crucial and what's ancillary, and it needs capable students to be able to read and understand things for themselves. Personally, I like Rotman: it's more terse, more well-organised, and Rotman is a better pedagogue.

Is such an accelerated program necessary? It is if one is training research mathematicians and one wants to both develop them and test their mettle. Ars longa, vita brevis. At the second- and third-tier schools one is (mostly) not training future research mathematicians. The ones who do emerge will be of measure zero. At these schools the ones who work through Gallian will, later in life, proudly reminesce at some cocktail party about how they got through abstract algebra and boy, were those Sylow theorems tough!

I myself went to a second-tier school (King's College London), and the difference between King's/Imperial/QMW/UCL on the one hand and Cambridge on the other was very clear. The grad courses at King's in algebraic topology, Lie groups, Riemann surfaces, knot theory were a complete joke. At Cambridge, in contrast, there were ranking mathematicians who knew the subject inside out and there was a detailed syllabus describing what exactly would be covered. Some of my Cambridge friends argue that the teaching is often abysmal but IMHO it's still streets ahead of other universities. Thus by the time a student has finished his part III at Cambridge, he knows some serious math -- unlike his counterpart at London who's completed a joke of an MSc.
 
Thus by the time a student has finished his part III at Cambridge, he knows some serious math -- unlike his counterpart at London who's completed a joke of an MSc.
Agreed, but as always there's a trade-off. I spent a semester at UCL and yes it was a good deal easier than Caltech (though I was taking Grad level courses). Yet at the same time, the ability to spend more time socializing had incalculable benefits to me personally, to the point where I do not at all regret choosing UCL over Cambridge for study abroad.
 
Yet at the same time, the ability to spend more time socializing had incalculable benefits to me personally, to the point where I do not at all regret choosing UCL over Cambridge for study abroad.

And there are some great museums in London with free entry ;).
 
Came across this:

In higher education, he believes he has identified a third bubble, with all the hallmarks of a classic speculative frenzy—­hyperinflated prices, investments by ignorant consumers funded largely by debt, and widespread faith in increasing returns.

But the skepticism is spreading, even among foot soldiers on the academic front lines. In March, “Professor X,” an anonymous English instructor at two middling northeastern colleges, published In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, an expansion of an Atlantic essay arguing that college has been dangerously oversold and that it borders on immoral to ask America’s youth to incur heavy debt for an education for which millions are simply ill-equipped. Professor X’s book came out on the heels of a Harvard Graduate School of Education report that made much the same point. The old policy cri de coeur “college for all,” the report argues, has proved inadequate; rather than shunting everyone into four-year colleges, we should place greater emphasis on vocational programs, internships, and workplace learning. Then, last month, a front-page article in the Times delivered striking news: Student-loan debt in the U.S. is approaching the trillion-dollar mark, outpacing credit-card debt for the first time in history. With all that debt, more and more are asking, what are we buying?

This new criticism of higher education comes from three main sources. The first is the reality that, while all parents want their kids to complete college, little more than half of those millions who haul their laptops to campus each fall actually end up with a bachelor’s degree. The United States now has the highest college-­dropout rate in the industrialized world, and in terms of 25-to-34-year-olds with college degrees, it has fallen from first to twelfth.

The second source is the quality of the education available on campus. Nearly half of all students demonstrate “exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent” gains in the skills measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, even after two years of full-time schooling, according to a study begun in 2005 by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. (Many education reformers have focused their attention to gains from investments on the other end of the spectrum, in pre-K schooling.) In 1961, the average undergraduate spent 25 hours a week hitting the books; by 2003, economists Mindy Marks and Philip Babcock recently found, that average had plummeted to thirteen hours.

But it is the data on the economics of college that is most disturbing. It’s bad enough that our colleges are under­performing, one can’t help thinking—but do they have to charge so damned much? In the past 30 years, private-­college tuition and fees have increased, in constant 2010 dollars, from $9,500 a year to more than $27,000. Public-college tuition has increased from $2,100 to $7,600. Fifteen years ago, the average student debt at graduation was around $12,700; in 2009, it was $24,000. Over the past quarter-century, the total cost of higher education has grown by 440 percent. “Like many situations too good to be true,” Louis Lataif, the dean emeritus of Boston University’s School of Management, wrote in February for Forbes, “like the dot-com boom, the Enron bubble, the housing boom or the health-care-cost explosion—the ever-­increasing cost of university education is not sustainable.”
 
Thiel does not dismiss those who say that higher education is a luxury good or that for some it might be a worthy investment, but he finds neither account adequate to explain the college bubble. It’s undoubtedly true, he said, that “it’s a lot more fun to go to college than to work.” And yet the fact that college now costs so much, and requires so much debt to complete, “probably leads people to be a lot more stressed out than they otherwise would be, so it’s probably a lot less fun than when it cost less.” His hunch is borne out by a comprehensive 2010 survey of freshmen that found emotional health to be at a record low—in large part because of financial worries.

As for college being a good investment, Thiel believes the 74 percent wage-­premium figure to be as inflated as tuition prices. A Clarium report Thiel commissioned in 2009 analyzed government data to argue that, while the return on a college diploma indeed increased markedly between 1978 and 2000, that’s only because the return on a high-school diploma decreased markedly during that same period. “Relative to the past,” the report stated, “students who go to college do better than their peers who do not, but this is simply a mathematical result of their peers doing worse than in the 1970s.”

But if college is neither a luxury good nor an investment, what is it? For Thiel, the commodity college most closely resembles is the humble insurance policy. Americans have become terrified, he says, of what will happen to their children if they don’t send them to college. The recession, widening income inequality, growing job insecurity, the uncertain future of the welfare state, the increasing costs of health care—all have deepened the anxieties that made college such an attractive option for a rising middle class in the first place. “I think that’s the way probably a lot of parents think about it. It’s a way for their kids to be safe, to be protected from the chaos. You’re paying for college because it’s an insurance policy against falling out of the middle class.” The larger question this raises, he says, is, “Why are we spending ten times as much for insurance as we were 30 years ago? And does that tell us something has gone really badly wrong with our country?”
 
My biggest criticism about college though is that so much we learn, we will never ever use. For instance, every college has requirements in humanities/social sciences. The only useful set of coursework (at least in Lehigh) that fell under the social science label was economics, because unlike the other classes labeled as such, it was the only one that you could completely sleep through class, look for the math words on the trivially easy exams (marginal=take derivative, average=take a mean, snore, get A), instead of being forced to read some worthless textbook on crap you had to simply memorize. And the rest of humanities/social science? Complete dreck in terms of what you'll need on your first job.

Similarly, (and I can only speak from an engineering grad's perspective), what about the peripheral "introduction to mechanical/electrical engineering" (two separate courses mind you) for someone studying operations research (what my major more or less was)? Utter garbage. Furthermore, some of the prerequisites are utterly pointless. For instance, at Lehigh, in order to get into a derivatives course, you had to take both investments and corporate finance, which bored me to tears so badly that I got Bs in those courses--and then absolutely torched the derivatives course with above a 100%...

IMO, there's far too much filler in college educations. IMO, legislators need to realize that people go to college for one main reason:

To get a job.

IMO, universities need to (in their coursework) provide the necessary background in their majors for those kinds of graduates to get the necessary background in as short a time frame as possible. Frankly, I believe that if we'd remove all the chaff (humanities/social science nonsense, introduction to peripheral topics, unnecessary introductions to science courses such as chemistry and physics), that so many programs could be completed in three years tops. After all, why spend an extra year in school and dilute your key coursework as opposed to A) saving $50,000 B) earning $50,000 and C) starting your career at least one year earlier?

The opportunity cost for each extra year of schooling that's unneeded is around $100,000 to start by this sort of back-of-the-envelope calculation.

Edit: one other thing I wonder about...how necessary are the extremely-theoretical, ridiculously higher-end courses? I mean unless you're going to be a theoretical research mathematician (are they really necessary?)...what purpose do they serve?
 
My biggest criticism about college though is that so much we learn, we will never ever use. For instance, every college has requirements in humanities/social sciences. The only useful set of coursework (at least in Lehigh) that fell under the social science label was economics, because unlike the other classes labeled as such, it was the only one that you could completely sleep through class, look for the math words on the trivially easy exams (marginal=take derivative, average=take a mean, snore, get A), instead of being forced to read some worthless textbook on crap you had to simply memorize. And the rest of humanities/social science? Complete dreck in terms of what you'll need on your first job.

Similarly, (and I can only speak from an engineering grad's perspective), what about the peripheral "introduction to mechanical/electrical engineering" (two separate courses mind you) for someone studying operations research (what my major more or less was)? Utter garbage. Furthermore, some of the prerequisites are utterly pointless. For instance, at Lehigh, in order to get into a derivatives course, you had to take both investments and corporate finance, which bored me to tears so badly that I got Bs in those courses--and then absolutely torched the derivatives course with above a 100%...

IMO, there's far too much filler in college educations. IMO, legislators need to realize that people go to college for one main reason:

To get a job.

IMO, universities need to (in their coursework) provide the necessary background in their majors for those kinds of graduates to get the necessary background in as short a time frame as possible. Frankly, I believe that if we'd remove all the chaff (humanities/social science nonsense, introduction to peripheral topics, unnecessary introductions to science courses such as chemistry and physics), that so many programs could be completed in three years tops. After all, why spend an extra year in school and dilute your key coursework as opposed to A) saving $50,000 B) earning $50,000 and C) starting your career at least one year earlier?

The opportunity cost for each extra year of schooling that's unneeded is around $100,000 to start by this sort of back-of-the-envelope calculation.

Edit: one other thing I wonder about...how necessary are the extremely-theoretical, ridiculously higher-end courses? I mean unless you're going to be a theoretical research mathematician (are they really necessary?)...what purpose do they serve?

I must disagree.

1.Due to historical reasons they force everyone to take courses that aren't from their field, college graduates are the modern equivalent to scholars of the old times hence you cannot be a genius in math and not know who was Stalin and what happened to Kennedy.

2.You might as well ask every student what is the exact job he wants and teach him only that, if this was how the case you wouldn't see so many people switching careers and professions like Quants would never exists since they are interdisciplinary by definition.

I do agree that you can improve how/what extra general courses students can take but I wouldn't want to completely abolish them.
 
1) I would hope you know who Stalin was and what happened to Kennedy before you needed to enroll in a 3-credit world history class in college.

2) Odds are, every single engineering student would need their core of math work (calculus up through multivariate, analysis if they're crazy about it, linear algebra, a basic run-through of prob and stat, anything beyond is up to them), a basic course in econ, and the rest is their major. But since when does a civil engineer need to know about chemical reactions, an electrical engineer needing to know basic industrial engineering, etc...

When it comes down to it, yes, every full-out profession is interdisciplinary, but if you want to be a quant, odds are, your first job is going to be programming something somewhere somehow. Aka, a compsci or operations research major should have a heavy dose of computing (and not just the software dev kind, but more informal scripting), and depending on how technical or how quantitative you want to get, there are different tracks to go through.

But completely unrelated gen-ed junk that gets thrown at you in freshman and sophomore year, and humanities/social science in junior/senior years? Is that some sort of bad joke? I mean honestly, at Lehigh University, in order to graduate, you had to take a total of 13 credits in breadth/depth in humanities/social sciences (beyond basic econ if you go that route IIRC). That is, one of those had to be 9+ credits, and the other one at least a 3 credit course. To be a fully-enrolled student, you have to have at least 12 credit hours. So wham, if we scratch that, that's one whole semester down. Next, chemistry (4 credits), mechanical physics + lab (5 credits) and electromagnetic physics + lab (5 credits). Another 14 credits, down the drain right there. Next, two intro to (unrelated engineering), in my case, it was mechanical and electrical. 3 credits each. Bam, another 6 credits. So how are we doing so far? Cut 35 credits right out. There's your whole year of unnecessary college, right out the window.

And I'm sure if people looked hard enough, they would be able to find more excess coursework to just throw out the window. This would substantially reduce college costs, accelerate how fast someone entered grad school (and/or ultimately started their career).

Now I know some people might think that not taking physics courses for engineers might be tantamount to heresy, but do we really need to remember which way electrons travel on some sort of charged rod of infinite length or whatever else it is? Now granted, I was able to cut some of that stuff out, and went for four years in undergrads but I got to take grad courses along the way, which actually helped me graduate Rutgers a semester early due to transfer credits =). And those courses paid off in getting the job I have (though I don't use those skills explicitly...yet)

Basically, if I told you "you've got a job to structure a college degree, but instead of having four years to get someone through college normally, you gotta get them out in six semesters instead of eight".

Odds are, it can be done.
 
1) I would hope you know who Stalin was and what happened to Kennedy before you needed to enroll in a 3-credit world history class in college.

2) Odds are, every single engineering student would need their core of math work (calculus up through multivariate, analysis if they're crazy about it, linear algebra, a basic run-through of prob and stat, anything beyond is up to them), a basic course in econ, and the rest is their major. But since when does a civil engineer need to know about chemical reactions, an electrical engineer needing to know basic industrial engineering, etc...

When it comes down to it, yes, every full-out profession is interdisciplinary, but if you want to be a quant, odds are, your first job is going to be programming something somewhere somehow. Aka, a compsci or operations research major should have a heavy dose of computing (and not just the software dev kind, but more informal scripting), and depending on how technical or how quantitative you want to get, there are different tracks to go through.

But completely unrelated gen-ed junk that gets thrown at you in freshman and sophomore year, and humanities/social science in junior/senior years? Is that some sort of bad joke? I mean honestly, at Lehigh University, in order to graduate, you had to take a total of 13 credits in breadth/depth in humanities/social sciences (beyond basic econ if you go that route IIRC). That is, one of those had to be 9+ credits, and the other one at least a 3 credit course. To be a fully-enrolled student, you have to have at least 12 credit hours. So wham, if we scratch that, that's one whole semester down. Next, chemistry (4 credits), mechanical physics + lab (5 credits) and electromagnetic physics + lab (5 credits). Another 14 credits, down the drain right there. Next, two intro to (unrelated engineering), in my case, it was mechanical and electrical. 3 credits each. Bam, another 6 credits. So how are we doing so far? Cut 35 credits right out. There's your whole year of unnecessary college, right out the window.

And I'm sure if people looked hard enough, they would be able to find more excess coursework to just throw out the window. This would substantially reduce college costs, accelerate how fast someone entered grad school (and/or ultimately started their career).

Now I know some people might think that not taking physics courses for engineers might be tantamount to heresy, but do we really need to remember which way electrons travel on some sort of charged rod of infinite length or whatever else it is? Now granted, I was able to cut some of that stuff out, and went for four years in undergrads but I got to take grad courses along the way, which actually helped me graduate Rutgers a semester early due to transfer credits =). And those courses paid off in getting the job I have (though I don't use those skills explicitly...yet)

Basically, if I told you "you've got a job to structure a college degree, but instead of having four years to get someone through college normally, you gotta get them out in six semesters instead of eight".

Odds are, it can be done.

Universities are supposed to create scholars/researchers giving someone the minimal set of tool to complete very specific jobs is against their goals.

I'm sure that some places give too many unrelated courses and some give too little , there is always room for improvement in everything we do.But I'll certainly wouldn't try to make universities into institutes that make you proficient in a specific chore.

I come from Electrical Engineering, which is one of the broadest fields out there, you can see EE planning power plants to carbon nano tubes to pure mathematics.Which part would you remove? If I like circuit design than I don't need to know about something else?
 
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