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Blabberwocky's avatar

Your description of the perverse incentives in course selection matches my experience perfectly. The current system seems to have arisen from the conflicting aims of providing students with a broad liberal arts background and preparing them to join the workforce (or for further, more serious study).

Challenging that does feel a bit pointless though if students don't go to school to learn, and schools don't accept students to teach them, and employers don't care about any of that.

The British system seems like a good alternative, where both core and elective learning are condensed into earlier years, and students then commit to much narrower scopes of study (A levels) before progressing to university. So the bridging between aims and expectations happens well before higher education.

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Julian D'Costa's avatar

I enjoyed this!

I went to a university significantly more rigid than your experience, and we chafed at it, so I want to defend freedom.

To be somewhat contrarian, your example seems to be like the system working as intended. The lab course is quite costly to the university per student and it's better if only those really interested in molecular biology take it. You mention starting out not interested in mol bio... and ending up not interested in mol bio. This seems fine. Did the evo bio courses go well?

More generally, it's true that 19-year-olds might not know how to design their own education, but there's a much better solution than forcing everyone to take the same courses in the same order - asking people, especially older students in the same major and people who just graduated (apart from college advisors whose job it is to help you with this). In college I chose to take courses based on gossip from seniors about which profs taught well, which courses were pre-reqs for others - which worked out quite nicely.

A nice system some universities have is fairly structured majors, plus the option of designing your own major for students who know what they want to do doesn't fit into a pre-defined major. This seems like the best of both worlds.

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