Off to College? 0
Chris Satullo had an interesting piece in Sunday’s local rag on what he sees as problems with the college admissions process. He was not looking at how colleges process paperwork; rather he was looking at it from a societal perspective. This item, in particular, caught my eye:
I have often questioned the wisdom of expecting students to choose a major in their freshman year. It’s certainly okay if someone knows what he or she wants to do.
I knew one person like that: His career goal was to write/edit for the Washington Post. Every move he made in college and after college was directed at that ambition, and, eventually, he succeeded.
But I suspect that most 18-year olds have only the haziest notion of what they want to do with the lives, and circumstances will change those notions.
Heck, when I went off to school, I was confident I wanted to be lawyer. Meeting some law students changed that; they were much too uptight for me.
Rather, I ended up in a profession (training and development) that I didn’t even know was a profession until after I had graduated and joined the world of work.
From another standpoint, I am struck by his citing the statistic that only “only 40 percent of students graduate within six years . . . .”
Two of my kids attended the local state university. When they entered, they were told that five years was the normal time for completing a bachelor’s degree.
The credit-hours they needed to finish were no more than I needed in the old days at a “four-year” college, and I went to a pretty good school. When I went to school, the standard was five courses a semester. They were counseled that four courses a semester was a normal course load. That two fewer courses a year. Two x four = eight courses to finish the fifth year.
I always wondered, when did four years stretch into five? And I always thought, quite cynically, when the university wanted to get an extra year’s room, board, tuition, and fees out of students pursuing a four-year degree.
