By Professor Doom
When it comes to
math, I’ve already shown that most of what’s offered in college, especially at
community college, is just repetition
of the material students saw in the 9th grade or lower, for about
90% of the coursework.
In times of yore,
the way how a college course was created was faculty, in a department, would
get together in a committee and decide what a course would have in it. As the
entire point of college is preparation, each course would be filled with the
material which would prepare the student for ever more advanced material. You
couldn’t just come with a course, make up your own curriculum, and have it
offered without other scholars looking it over and verifying that the course
would be worthwhile for students to take.
This process has
changed at many campuses. Instead of a committee, all you need now is just one
faculty saying he has an idea which will sell. He then goes to admin, and tells
him the course will sell; if they believe him, then, just like that, we have a
new college course. Whether the course is a waste of students’ time or not is
irrelevant…sales growth is all.
Now, courses which
will sell are naturally courses students are interested in. A key component in
this is to have very little material (because studying isn’t fun for most students),
and today students have a wide variety of fake courses which they can take…and
learn nothing.
This is a big
factor in why so many college graduates have literally nothing in the way of
new skills or knowledge: the bulk of their coursework is, at best, introductory
material which anyone can learn in a few weeks, a month at most.
A recent
article on ZeroHedge listed a great number of fake courses—it’s a small
sampling, I assure you—and I want to discuss how some of these courses
highlight the issues in today’s higher ed.
“…the quality of education that our college
students are receiving is a complete joke. Especially on the
undergraduate level, almost all testing consists of either true/false, multiple
choice or fill in the blank questions…”
The above actually addresses what goes in
the “real” courses. Even fairly advanced courses are now taught in huge lecture
halls. There simply is no way you can grade hundreds of tests in a sane amount
of time except through “fill in the bubble” testing.
Similarly, there’s no way to address even
mildly confusing material in a huge course. It’s one thing to address a topic
that 6 students will have questions about (in a 30 person class), as you can
handle that many questions in a typical 50 minute course. But if now you have
60 people with questions (in a 300 person class), well, there’s no way to
handle that many questions in a sane amount of time. Best not cover things
which generate questions.
The end result is many of course college
courses only address the lightest part of material in the most superficial way,
putting it all down in a few dozen PowerPoint slides; I’ve reviewed a number of
these courses, and you can literally read/learn everything in the course at a
passable level in an afternoon, two at most if you knew nothing of the material
before you started.
But these courses soak up 4 months of a
student’s time while generating thousands of dollars of tuition per student.
And those are the “real” courses. Let’s
look at just a few fake ones:
WOMGEN 1225: Leaning In, Hooking Up (Harvard
University)
For the uninitiated, let’s go over what
the above says. “WOMGEN” says this course is taught in the Women’s and Gender
Studies department, a department notorious for fake courses. The “1” in “1225”
says this is a course for freshmen (if the number started with 2 it would be
for second year courses, and so on).
And the title says this course will teach
students about “hooking up” and getting into sexual encounters.
Yes, sure, this course will sell, but
pretty much every adult on the planet knows about how to get sex, and it hasn’t
been an issue anywhere for millennia. It’s obvious on the face of it that no
useful job skills are here, and, far more importantly from the point of view of
someone who cares about education, this
course in no way prepares the student for more advanced study.
But the title is obviously an easy sell to
students, right? Way to go, Harvard.
SOAN 261:
Campus Sex in the Digital Age (Washington & Lee University)
“SOAN” refers to Sociology and
Anthropology, and the “2” makes this a second year course (not all campuses use
4 digits for their course numbers). A second year course? Can the gentle reader
even guess what about this title makes it clear you need to know some prior
coursework to do well here? I sure cannot.
Again, we have a title clearly chosen to
maximize sales. Yes, I’ve mentioned many times in this blog how dubious
sex-related coursework is big on campus, but, as always, I like to show that
I’m not merely making things up in this regard.
GWS 462: Hip
Hop Feminism (University
of Illinois)
Back to Gender and Women’s Studies (not
all schools name their departments the same way), this is a senior level
course, the most advanced coursework students in the Gender Studies degree
program might see before graduating.
And they learn about Feminism in the Hip
Hop community. It takes 3 years of preparation before you can address this
topic in detail? Seriously?
SOC 388:
Marriage in the Age of Trump (Davidson College)
You get the feeling this one was slapped
together quickly by the Sociology department? I’m puzzled by this being a third
year course, but I’m vastly more puzzled by the title. We’re living in the Age
of Trump now? Gee whiz, it’s only been a year, and now it’s an “age”?
Marriage is a serious commitment, in our
Western Society a couple usually is romantically involved well over a year
before they get married. So how could the Trump phenomenon, being less than a
year old, affect a multi-thousand year old institution so quickly?
Being taught in the Sociology Department
(very notable for Leftism), it’s a safe bet the professor here is going to use
this course to rage against Trump in a torrent of hate; I’ve a number of
friends suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, so I’m pretty confident of this.
In any event, the “Age of Trump” might not
even be 4 years, and can’t be more than 8 years…so what exactly could this
course be preparation for?
SOCI 332:
Alternative Genders (Texas
A&M University)
Just a quick comment on this one: we
really, really, need to cut back on sex-related coursework, particularly when
it’s based on fad material.
AFA 4430:
Black Lives Matter (University
of Florida)
In addition to heavy emphasis on
sexuality, there is a strong emphasis on ideology in fake courses. Now,
absolutely, the BLM movement is worthy of study, even study by advanced
scholars (this is a 4th year course taught in the African Studies
department), but…BLM is not so old, so huge, with figures so prominent, that
you can spend 4 whole months on it. A seminar would have been fine, if there
were more interest in educating students than soaking up student loan money.
ENVS 042:
Ecofeminism (Swarthmore
College)
This
course might technically not count as college level, at least (a “0” usually indicates
remediation, but that word doesn’t seem to apply to this topic). How can there
be any doubt from the title that this course is ideology? Environmental
Sciences is now a department, apparently.
FRSEMR 61D:
Trying Socrates in the Age of Trump (Harvard University)
Again with the Age of Trump? This is a
generic Freshman Seminar, so not a college course. With any luck at all, the
students aren’t charged for this…but I’m worried that scholars at two different
institutions honestly think a single year makes an “age”—actually, it’s less
than a year, since these courses couldn’t possibly be proposed, much less
created and offered, until after the election. Would “1 week” constitute an
age? That’s seriously how much time could have passed between the election and
creation of the course (when I review
a course before teaching it, incidentally, it takes me more than week, even for
a course I’ve taught many times before).
The article goes on with courses on Star
Trek, Lady Gaga, Harry Potter, and other topics, often taught in departments
which didn’t even exist when I was in school. And, I assure the reader, none of
this stuff is preparation for more advanced study.
I’m so grateful I went to college in a
time when the only coursework available was work that prepared me for better
things. If my degree had been filled with the above stuff, things which will
almost certainly be of no relevance a few decades from now, I would have
nothing from my education…much like many students today.
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