The evils of a 'balanced' education...

[pboily]

Yet I still get punished because the guy in the sandals and black socks can't talk to girls.

Yep.

That will teach us not to have be-friended him early on and taught him how to get laid.

 

[newfangle]

Well holy hell....

There is no cardinal number to describe the size of the set of my rage.

 

[Babbler]

Well holy hell....

There is no cardinal number to describe the size of the set of my rage.

Spoken like a true math nerd.

 

[newfangle]

Jesus, humour is quite elusive for you.

 

[pboily]

Well holy hell....

There is no cardinal number to describe the size of the set of my rage.

This means that your rage must be a class rather than a set.

I could tell you it builds character, but it doesn't really.

On a personal level, I managed to convinced myself it was a survival-of-the-fittest matter: I'll play the game your way for now, but next year, I'm taking the courses I want to take. It didn't work, my advisor picked my courses and I even had to take that god-awful graduate algebra class. I would have had more fun at a political convention.

I used to feel that paying for the degree gave me rights. I now think I paid for the chance to learn the stuff. Sounds lame, I know, but that's the way the admin/teacher sees it, and I'm not sure they're wrong...

 

[Cuivienen]

So why don't people who don't go to University have to take this balanced education, if it's so important?

Because no one can force you to have an education at all after high school. But, if you choose to educate yourself after high school, you get it all.

On an aside, there are schools that have no requirements. The most famous is Brown University.

 

[mdwh]

The math departments, for instance, are training future mathematicians, even if that's not what the students themselves are there for. In the opinion of mathematical professionals (who are responsible for the composition of the curriculum), a good mathematician will need to not only have more than one feather to his/her hat, but will also have done **** that they absolutely hate: it's amazingly good practice for all the annoying administrative tasks one has to deal with and the students that don't give a piece of crap, and it shows the prospective employer you're not a borderline idiot savant. Nobody wants to work with nerds, even mathematicians.

As a result, a department is not going to risk that the star students are less than adequately trained just because some (most?) students don't see the forest for the trees.

Take it from a fellow mathematician, you'll have a much easier time gaining employment in a mathematically-related field if you can show you're not a freakin' math nerd.

Firstly, a University in my opinion should be most concerned with teaching people academically, not training them for a job - let alone preparing them for menial admin jobs!

As to more general education, that's what A Levels (of all the previous education) is for - or whatever they have in the US.

Saying "In the opinion of mathematical professionals" is weasel words - do you have a reference that all "mathematical professionals" support the US system of studying various courses at university?

And there are plenty of things within maths that many maths students will still dislike (e.g., pure versus applied).

As for "Nobody wants to work with nerds", studying other subjects does not help this at all, you can still be a geek in any academic subject. That's only helped with doing non-academic things.

I speak as someone who studied maths too.

 

[mdwh]

Because no one can force you to have an education at all after high school. But, if you choose to educate yourself after high school, you get it all.

Thankfully not in the UK you don't. And that doesn't answer the question of why learning these courses is necessary, when going to University isn't compulsory.

On an aside, there are schools that have no requirements. The most famous is Brown University.

How is schools that have no requirements related to this?

 

[luiz]

I'm with newf.
I too had to take many useless courses. Some of them made me dumber, I'd say. Others(cough sociology cough) made me hate commies more than I already did, and that is certainly unhealthy. BTW, why is it that every single sociologist on the planet is a communist? Is there a massive brainwashing conspiracy that I'm missing?

All in all, the University should only require credits on the disciplines of each course. Getting a broader perspective should be the option of each student.

 

[Archbob]

Because Universities want to train socially acceptable people who have a wide range of knowledge but someone who knows only math and nothing else. If you have other knowledge, you could potentially gain emplyment in some field other than mathematics. If you only take pure math and you can't get a job in academia, your pretty screwed.

 

[pboily]

Firstly, a University in my opinion should be most concerned with teaching people academically, not training them for a job - let alone preparing them for menial admin jobs!

Don't I wish it were the case....

Math departments have one and only one job: producing mathematicians, training mathematicians.

Saying "In the opinion of mathematical professionals" is weasel words - do you have a reference that all "mathematical professionals" support the US system of studying various courses at university?

I can do better than that, I can give you a proof: when a majority of mathematicians don't support something that is imposed by the administration (such as Harvard's "new" calculus, or minimal averages, to name but two common practices that were in place when I was a student) it disappears after a few years. The fact that the western system of studying various courses is still in place (even for mathematicians) speaks volumes, in a contrapositive sense.

As for "Nobody wants to work with nerds", studying other subjects does not help this at all, you can still be a geek in any academic subject. That's only helped with doing non-academic things.

understanding that you need to do things that you don't like (and most mathematicians hate having to study anything other than math for credit) is a sure sign of non-nerdiness, I think.

I speak as someone who studied maths too.

cool!

 

[Cuivienen]

How is schools that have no requirements related to this?

No requirements = Don't have to take anything outside of, say, mathematics.

 

[El_Machinae]

I hated my options at first, but I found philosophy to be very useful, since it presents new types of thinking compared to science and math. And then I absolutely loved economics ... so much that I filled all my 'options' with masses of economic courses.

After I've been through it, I prefer that a university education means that a graduate is somewhat balanced, and so a person like myself can assume a graduate knows a little bit about the world.

 

[The Yankee]

I don't mind the requirements I have to take in my college. It's confusing, yes, as they made a new system for the people that entered when I did, and yes, there are a few courses that I'd rather not have taken (*cough*that Art History course*cough*), it was broad enough once I figured out how it worked to allow me to explore more in political science and in history. A nice break from finance courses.

Graduate school will be a different story, however.

 

[blackheart]

That's why I'm going to Business School. I'm not going to pay massive ammounts of money for college to take courses I don't care about nor want to be in.

 

[downtown]

I dont know how I feel about my gen-eds. Certainly, they are the classes that have hurt my GPA the most, (Psych, Western Religion)...but others have been very helpful, like my stats class.

A huge Gen-ED program was the the Number 1 reason why I didn't go to BYU, even though it was free. I think American's is pretty managable, and does a lot of good for a lot of the students who werent very well rounded going into the school

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

Why oh why do you universities require their students to take options? I mean, honestly, we aren't in high school anymore. University is a place for people to learn what they want to learn. If you want to take courses unrelated to your degree, go for it! University is also a place to experiment. But options as requirements for graduation is assinine.

In my case, I am entering my last year of a B.Sc. in mathematics. Of the 40 courses I need to graduate, I am required to take 8 non-science options (2 of which have to be humanities, 2 social science, 4 of any other). That's 20% of my degree. Thousands of dollars. For what? A few regurgitory multiple choice exams on monkeys, feminists, communists, ideal economics, and the alphabets of some long-dead tribe from Clickland? How does this make me a better mathematician?

Logic and other non-math mathy courses only take up so much space. At some point I have to pay to take some atrociously pointless course that drains my soul every second I sit there listening to mundane, pointless verbal arse-discharge.

Arg! I still have 4 more of these buggers to do. And not only do I hate them, they are significantly more work for me than a high-level math course (yes I suppose I have a one-track mind blah blah blah).

Phew, I feel better. Now back to linguistics...

Chuck them up as holdovers from a bygone era, when a university education wasn't meant as career advancement, but simply a means to make one a more knowledgible person. I also found it ridiculous. I had to take courses like sociology, anthropology, and linguistics. These are classes that are forgotten as quickly as they are lectured. To this day, I have no recollection of anything that happened in them, and learned nothing.

Look at it this way: you don't have to ace these classes, just pass.

 

[The Yankee]

I dont know how I feel about my gen-eds. Certainly, they are the classes that have hurt my GPA the most, (Psych, Western Religion)...but others have been very helpful, like my stats class.

A huge Gen-ED program was the the Number 1 reason why I didn't go to BYU, even though it was free. I think American's is pretty managable, and does a lot of good for a lot of the students who werent very well rounded going into the school

And don't forget that a lot of them have all these math and English classes because so many incoming freshmen don't know how to string a sentence together. It's easy to say that colleges should jettison them quickly, though I wonder how much lower attendances would mean for the bottom lines of many colleges.

Nano- True enough, though they may drag down your GPA quite a bit if there were a string of classes that one just passed. Maybe I'm lucky for the program and my couple interests.

 

[Verbose]

BTW, why is it that every single sociologist on the planet is a communist? Is there a massive brainwashing conspiracy that I'm missing?

An old evergreen like Max Weber included? Really? Did they make you read Anthony Giddens? Hardly a communist, as he is the court-sociologist of Tony Blair.

I'd suspect you had commie professors disregarding any sociologist who wasn't one as well.

 

[shortguy]

Screw you guys, I have no area requirements!

I don't really see any problem with area requirements. So you have to take stuff you don't like? What else is new? I guess that you're paying tons of money for it, but still, you're the one who signed up...