College

So someone told me I should post a blog about how I feel about college.

College the way it is set up now is soo out of date it is ridiculous. In a field of study you might take half of your classes because they are required and are of no interest to you or to your career goals. They might not even be related to your field of study in any way. To make this worse you even have to pay for the "worthless" courses. I say the classes "worthless" because they are something you have no desire to learn or care anything about so you learn and then brain dump everything after the quarter. This in an antiquated system and is so ingrained into the education system. I ask you, does an electrical engineer really need to know the basics of psychology, or how much a Van Gogh sold for 50 years ago. I really seriously doubt it unless they want to be a contestant on Jeopardy.
And then I love how they teach you one thing over and over for a quarter and then next class you have a different professor and he has a totally different system. Better yet is when you learn something and are forced to not use a calculator or reference for some difficult problem, where in the real world you would just use your computer or any program designed to do that and be done with it, but you don't know that system because you have been doing it by hand the whole time. An example I will use from Karyn. She took a web design class and learned how to write html coding and was required to do all the coding by hand. Next design class she took required here to use Dreamweaver and expected her to know about it from the first design class.
Some changes need to be made and I have a few suggestions. First get rid of required classes that are not in your field. I suggest having a set layout of required classes and then slots of electives where you can take any class you want as long as you meet the prerequisites. This would allow students to pick classes that they are interested in. Instead of being forces to choose between Fine Arts appreciation and Intro to psychology I could have chosen a basic coding or a class I had interest in and would probably had a much better time and gotten better grades.
Secondly Standardize within a field what must be taught in each class. That way when you do from design 1 to design 2 you don't need to relearn a completely different program. this would help the students and relieve a lot of stress. Also try not to require them to use a old outdated program if there is a better one out there and they have it let them use it. Don't change what is taught in the class but don't force people to use an abacus when they have a calculator in their backpack. There are many many changes that need to happen but as long as the money is being made (at increasingly alarming rates) the colleges will continue to do as they are.

Well that is all for today maybe I will right about how I feel about undergrads teaching the class while the real professor is out doing research to get published, or about the outrageous costs of college, or maybe even politics (oh joy) another time.