I love this thread and will include some of my thoughts as a middle class, public school, domestic student.....I entered college as a biotech major and wanted to go to grad school and develop products for sport nutrition companies. Freshman Bio and Chemistry were very very time consuming and required a lot of dictionary like memorization, but were not challenging or stimulating on an intellectual front. Calculus, Physics, Statistics, and Economics for much more intellectually stimulating, fulfilling and the first two were also decently challenging. Economics, originally my intended minor, became my major after not enjoying biology and chemistry, and loving intermediate macro, intermediate micro, and econometrics. I continued to take the "tough" courses and minored in math, statistics, and computer science.
Here are my thoughts:
1. The difference between high school and college is the requirement to understand material. The tests in high school are less intensive and grades are inflated through easy "busy work" type of daily assignments. Also, attending class everyday means that most of the material is presented during class hours. College requires outside of class prep work, and the motivation to actually understand the material to succeed on tests as opposed to memorizing concepts.
2. The "Open Door" college policy: every youth should go to college. The push by seemingly everyone to increase college attendance without keeping any decent standards has drastically reduced the level of instruction in the "soft" subject areas. So while management and political science majors have been dumbed down to accommodate mediocrity, curricula in "hard" subjects are less flexible (integrating a function is and will always be integrating a function). A huge gap in difficulty between subjects is a result.
3. In most highschools there are two ways to succeed academically: One- Being naturally intellegent and not needing to put forth much effort to make A's. Two- Not having any intellectual advantage and putting forth a significant effort to make A's. Because of the aforementioned occurance in my #2 the same type of gpa success can be acheived at the college level by either of these two ways in the "soft" subjects. Howver, the STEM subjects actually require intellect and discipline, a combination rare in modern America, and the reason why the majority of graduate programs in these subjects are filled with international students.
We need to combat grade inflation starting in primary school, prepare children to stay disciplined even after moving out of mommy and daddys house for college, allow foreign students who complete a STEM degree and pass a background check to become permanent residents, and instead of cutting the SMART grant to pay for more Pell Grants, the opposite should have occurred. My guess is that the percentage of international and first generation citizens who start out in a STEM program and finish the STEM program is much higher than that of typical American students. Also, students should be free to study whatever they please, but if universities mandated passing Calc II before taking upper level coursework and Calc III and a calc based statistics course to graduate with a bachelors degree regardless of subject, America would be much better off!