Why does the university have to do that? If the public schools are all well funded, then they will suck less and this won’t happen. A university can then be confident that anyone with a high school degree is going to be just fine.
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Definitely if the public schools are well funded, we shouldn’t have this problem.
As it stands we definitely do have this problem. If that problem goes away, we don’t need this.
Say for whatever reason any school continues to have a 50% freshman dropout rate. Well then it’s on that school to teach people what they need to pass their freshman curriculum.
Nobody knows more about what what a student needs to make it through RITs freshman CS curriculum than RIT’s CS dept.
Those people need to repeat a few years of high school. They should have been held back to complete that education sufficiently.
Our culture of passing people mostly automatically year by year K-12 is a real problem.
It was the IT program, not the CS program 
I did IT.
The things they needed were basic maths and language skills. IT even had 101 classes for computers. Right down to “what is a hard drive?” The first programming classes assumed you had literally never encountered the concept of computer programming in your life.
The people who failed out couldn’t pass their general ed classes. They failed their language, science, and maths courses. IT was the least of their problems.
RIT did solve the problem, and the failout rate is way lower now. They solved it by having much stricter admissions standards…
And by making things easier, primarily by getting rid of the quarter system.
Yeah, I’m leaving out the other main cause of failout. People didn’t know how to live. Couldn’t do laundry, couldn’t manage their own meal plans, got too homesick and kept leaving campus only to start falling behind, etc… Freshmen weren’t allowed to choose the more flexible meal plans because there was a history of very poor decision making. (I got on the “all-debit” plan right away because I technically came in as a Junior credit-wise). =P
I remember hating that Freshman Orientation class. It was basically high school health class. “Take showers. Eat.” But several people failed it, so…
But that’s a separate problem. A lot of people I knew in high school failed out of other schools for similar reasons…
I’d love to see K-12 expanded to be a guaranteed K-16. Specialty schools can be in lieu of the last four, but there should always be a public option. And it should be free/required.
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We had orientation before college graduation where they begged us to wear deodorant.
Home Ec should be required classes for all public schooling. Every person being should be capable of basic cooking, cleaning/hygiene, and maybe minor hardware repair.
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I’d rather just model our system after the UK and specialize high school than expand required education into your 20s.
I’d love to see a free continuing education system.
Anyone who works in a field where they need to keep learning new things can go there for free to maintain accreditation, licensing, etc. If this exists, then we can require people to do it, and it won’t be unfair. We can also require employers to keep paying, and not let go, of their employees if they are out of work for awhile because they are attending class to stay up to snuff on their education.
Also, anyone who is unemployed can attend for free to learn the field of their choice. Maybe they learned something earlier in life that is no longer valuable. Maybe they just want to change careers. Maybe they fucked up earlier in life and want a second, third, or tenth chance. Doesn’t matter. Unemployed people attending will be PAID to do so, not the other way around. You can’t focus on learning if you’re worried about rent or food.
I’d also love to see companies hiring practices demolished just like university admissions. Too many companies have positions open for jobs that are not difficult at all. Any remotely competent person can learn to do the job if given the opportunity. They just refuse to hire someone who doesn’t already know, and the positions remain open for long periods of time.
Instead it should be considered discriminatory to not hire a person who is capable of doing the job. If you need someone to do X, you can’t find someone who already knows X, you must hire someone who can learn X and teach them X. You want this position filled, train them yourselves or pay for training.
Apprenticeship used to be the thing. People would, of course, choose apprentices based on bullshit like familial connections, money, social standing, etc. We can eliminate that part of the process today if we try. The point is they were hiring people who knew nothing about the work they were about to do. The employer was responsible for the specific training.
I see no reason Google couldn’t be hiring people with high school diplomas and teaching them how to code. Offloading that cost onto student loans is a large contributor to inequality. If corporations were expected to be responsible for training employees, that would be the same as if we paid off all the student loan debt ever with money from the pockets of corporate executives.
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I don’t know that that really made things easier. Under semesters you have to handle more classes simultaneously which is rough for kids who don’t have their shit together. Probably a majority of my friends preferred quarters, as did I.
I did quarters at Drexel, they still do quarters. Drexel schedules your classes freshman year (allowing you to pick specific times and professors) to prevent freshmen from overloading their plates with too many clases and there is a set ramp up of gen-ed classes mixed with your major classes for onboarding including a similar college 101, how to be an adult class required for everyone (honors students with credits coming in included).
Ah… My IST program had those 101-type classes, too. I was able to skip most of them, thankfully.
Me: Do I really need to take a class on…checks notes… Microsoft Word?
Advisor: Do you know how to type?
Me: Yes.
Advisor: Then you can skip it.
I knew people who failed that course. Blew my mind.
The peak of my IST program was when I got to do an independent study with one of our profs who was a part-time contributor to IBM Watson. I got to create a web app for the university radiology department for doing documentation and supervisory communication for their interns and residents.
All that is to say: I learned more about the career I ended up going into by working with a professional in the field than I did in any standard course work.
I should say some of the entry gen-ed classes were skip-able with a suitably high AP class score, but you could only replace them with a class in the same genre and still had to adhere to the meta-schedule freshman year. IE oh you got a 4 or 5 in AP English you can take an elective in a literature study class or writing class instead but still during your 1st quarter like everyone else.
I wouldn’t have gone to RIT if I hadn’t been able to skip all of the freshman classes with my AP credits. They were all literally 10th grade level basics.
The only class like that I was forced to take was “Writing & Literature II.” For some reason it was specifically exempt from AP credits.
It was horrible. Every second of that class was torture.
Every post in this thread so far has so many assumptions about college baked in that mainly apply to the American education system that I don’t even know where or how I could join in.
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I’d start by pointing out some of the assumptions we’re all making only because we’re not familiar with education systems of other places.
I’d say something but I don’t know a great deal about how college goes in the US, I’m kinda middling for knowledge about the UK system unless you want to know which unis have the best Student union pubs, and out of all the Australians on the forum, I’m the only one who didn’t go to university, so I just don’t have anything useful to contribute.
I’d say this is not just a thread for college admissions, it’s a thread for general education discussion, so anything goes.
America guarantees that you will be at least babysat in a building until you turn 18. After that, you’re basically on your own.
One of our states (Michigan) recently had a court case where it was decided that learning anything is literally not in the mandate of public schools. Only attendance is required.
So yeah…