The Disadvantages of an Elite Education
Jun 23, 08:17 AM by Eric Allen
I just ran into an article from The American Scholar that confirms many of my fears about top-tier schools. Having blatantly and publicly resigned from the whole pre-school system and headed off to an essentially vocational school (okay, engineering is a pretty awesome vocation, but still), I have found an interesting path. Unfortunately, most of the people around me at RPI are even less interested in being intellectual. Not only did they play by the rules, but they “lost” the game. Come on, guys! I, for one, and thoroughly enjoying the activities on campus, including a College Democrats club that has zero political science majors and a student-run sound reinforcement crew. I mix rock concerts! There is a significant handful of people at my university who do what they do because they enjoy it, not because it will get them good scores.
My Computer Science Rant
Dec 28, 04:44 AM by Eric Allen
If you go to RPI, you’ve probably gotten my Comp Sci rant a few too many times. I was pretty convinced that computer science does not prepare programmers for software engineering before I got to college, but now I’m sure of it. Why don’t we have a software engineering major here?! Anyway, somebody else beat me to blogging about it.
Excuse me?
Oct 15, 08:55 AM by Eric Allen
College counseling is a controversial industry. Some say it’s completely unethical to “game” the system, while others maintain that it’s part of the game. I’m somewhat ambivalent, since I did benefit from my (private) high school’s college counselor. This appalled me. These kids are having their entire lives run by some woman getting paid obscene amounts of money for what? I understand that some universities provide better opportunities than others, but this is just gross class discrimination.
What repulses me the most about this behavior is what happens to the kids. A few hundred thousand dollars here and there isn’t much for a rich family, and ivies have always been the domain of the rich to some extent. But the kids? They are having every minute of their lives from preschool through senior year of high school scripted and examined. This is not how human beings are meant to grow up! Kids need to learn new things, explore their interests, and discover who they are. They are being prevented from doing this in the most cruel way I can imagine: by the parents who are supposed to be loving and supporting them! Nobody deserves this kind of treatment.
Connections
Dec 12, 01:24 PM by Eric Allen
As one of my Freshman year teachers put it, “you’ll be lucky if you remember what subject I taught.” If you seriously don’t expect us to remember everything, then why are you teaching it to us? Is there an alternative? I say there is.
