[quote=sdduuuude]I tell people that my path through college was the right one – go to a big, cheap state school with a half-decent program in your area of interest. If you go to grad school, pay the big bucks and go to a top school. This way only 1/3 of your education is expensive and you still get the big-name school on the resume, and you get the better education when you are more mature and actually interested in learning something.[/quote]
Dude, your advice is absolutely spot-on!! Parents practically bankrupt themselves to send their kids to superexpensive undergrad schools. As is often the case, kids either screw off academically, or change majors because they can’t keep up with the demands, and the end result of this huge monetary investment is a kid with a degree in 18th-Century Canadian Literature or The History of Dance, and a transcript with lots of Ws, and a mixed bag of unrelated courses, half of which carry C and D grades.
If you ask the parents why they are sending their kids to I-Got-the-Bucks University, they’ll tell you they’re trying to give their child the best competitive edge in their future careers. If you ask what it is about this particular school that guarantees them this “edge”, 95% of the time they’ll tell you that it was in the top 10 of some bogus chart published by US News and World Report. The other 5% will offer up some marketing gem straight from the pages of the college website.
As I mentioned above, if your kid is going to pursue a career in R&D in the sciences that is anything beyond lab tech level, postgraduate education is a given. And that’s what’s going to count when they get into the career field. Any good state college or university should be able to give a student the foundation they need to get into grad school and handle the extreme work load there. Not only will it be much cheaper, it will probably be a far less competitive and less pressured atmosphere for the student, giving him a better chance to earn good grades and to really think about whether their major will result in the type of lifetime career they really want.
And, as also mentioned previously, many institutions give stipends to their science grad students that completely cover their tuition (sometimes more) in return for the teaching and lab duties the students are expected to handle.
[quote=sdduuuude] Make sure they can handle at least pre-calculus in high-school. Math should be easy for them. If not, it’s off to business school.[/quote]
Will you freakin’ science and engineer types please shove your “People who excel in math become scientists and engineers; the people who can’t handle math get on the short bus to B-school” stereotypes where the sun don’t shine?! Admittedly, it’s been a very long time, but I can recall having some fairly stringent math adventures in some of my more advanced finance, econ, and statistics courses (fortunately, electroshock therapy has erased the nightmare memories of those happy times). And calculus was required.
Keep in mind that many undergrad professors at the time would not permit the use of calculators (not that we poor students could begin to afford the relatively simple models available).
I do realize that the undergrad business curriculum has expanded, and that college courses at many institutions have been “dumbed down” (which probably explains the state of today’s businesses and financial institutions). But I am still very sensitive to remarks that allude to mathematically-clueless business curriculum students. I’m married to a Ph.D.-level chemist, so that could explain a lot of my antagonism on the subject.
[quote=sdduuuude] And please, for god’s sake, make your little engineers take economics.[/quote]
You’re a god, sdduuuude!! I agree wholeheartedly! In fact, it should be a requirement of both engineering and science curricula, IMHO.
