Quality of Education

One of the biggest and most common complaints is that the school is too big. There are maybe 50,000 students plus a few thousand staff and faculty. The numbers vary some each year. Due to the school being so large students often feel like just a social security number to faculty and staff. Students get passed around from office to office while being given wrong information. A lot of times faculty and staff do not care if they give wrong information or not. Unqualified people teach, non-English speaking people teach, people who are not American citizens teach, and the university takes NO responsibility for wrongful advising of coursework, poor teaching and/or class structure. Beware of advisors who are not familiar with the programs and do not know how to advise students academically. Check out their intellect, knowledge and experience!

A class ranges from approximately 30 to even 800 people. Very little to none of one-on-one personal contact and instruction from teachers. If you ever see another student cheating on an exam - DO NOT REPORT IT! I repeat, DO NOT REPORT CHEATING unless you are willing to possibly accept a lower grade for yourself. You risk representing yourself as a moral and honest human being by reporting cheating.

Trim the College!

The purpose of college according to Jacques Barzun.

What is the true purpose of a college? What should the liberal arts teach, and why? Famed Columbia University historian Jacques Barzun addresses these questions:

To be of any worth, the liberal arts must not only figure in the catalogue, they must be taught as arts, not as scholarly disciplines - and it must be done by teachers. The present system favors the opposite. Scholars known for their research or giving signs of such a future are put in the classroom to do what they choose. Departments promote and give them salary increases, while barely tolerating the men and women who merely teach. These last usually do it well, are appreciated by the students, and often keep up with the advances in knowledge on a wider front than the honored specialists. This rooted academic tradition is a second show of Unreason. True, among the fine scholars some are excellent teachers and also less good ones, who nevertheless have a conscience and work hard at the task. But the general tendency is to teach the liberal arts as professional subjects. Indeed, one may hear the teacher of an introductory course assert that he hopes to attract some of the students into his field as scholars. The course thereby ceases to be a college subject. Liberal in liberal arts means precisely free of professionalism and pedantry, immediate use, and the business-like mood.

At the present time there is an even worse corruption of the college curriculum, in the form of topics masquerading as subjects. Whether meant to acclimate pop culture on campus or to get large classes, these pseudo subjects are anti-liberal in their temporary appeal and their particularity. After concentrating on such questions, it is no wonder that college students turn for graduation speakers to the stars of TV news and the entertainment world.

What, by contrast, are the college youths to carry away from their study of the liberal arts and still possess when they have been swallowed up by career, parenthood, and civic obligations? Some of what they learned will be buried, but innumerable portions of fact, purport, reasoning, and significance will still be fresh for instant recognition and application to life uses. It is this apperceptive mass that makes them deserve to be called educated instead of ignorant.