Online: Pressure to get into grad school hinders undergrad experience

The biggest lie about college is that it is fundamentally
different from high school.

The truth is that it’s just another competition for
admittance into the next best medical, law or business school. It
is the next tier of higher education, a high school for the 21st
century, where an undergraduate degree doesn’t mean much
unless you plan on progressing toward graduate school. When it
comes down to it, there is no such thing as learning for pleasure
at UCLA.

When people are choosing which classes to take, decisions seem
to come down to either, “What do I have to do to get Mondays
and Fridays off?” or “Is this guy easy?” The goal
of many self-respecting first-years has become to merely survive
for four years with a respectable three-point-something grade point
average.

Why else would anyone, for any reason, anywhere, ever take a
class about air pollution? Resources like www.bruinwalk.com or the
UCLA forums are bastions of those looking for easy general
education classes to boost their GPAs.

There are few incentives and little consideration given for
taking interesting and motivating classes. Majority opinion conveys
that there is absolutely no time to dabble in passing interests.
All the major, pre-major and general education classes set most
students’ course-plans in stone. Fulfilling the
“Foundations of Knowledge” as decreed by the UC Gods
becomes priority number one over tailoring an individual education,
which satisfies one’s own unique demands for knowledge.

The general education classes are adequate in providing students
with a trivial scope of everything, but they fail in sustaining a
deeper curiosity about subjects outside the major. Greater
individual control over general class selection would go a long way
towards creating an environment in which real enthusiasm and
activism about education exists. When was the last time you saw
someone yelling about that awesome linguistics general education
class?

I’m certain that for the majority of students with
conviction and secure majors, the current system is fine. But I
would bet I am not alone when I say I feel the pressure of choosing
between classes I am interested in and those which help me towards
my degree. I am a pre-business economics major “for
now.” And to be honest with you, I have no clue what
pre-business economists do besides make enjoyably pointless demand
and supply curves and sleep in class. Even better, I’m taking
advanced math and psychology classes, which will not get me any
closer to getting out of here with a diploma in three-and-a-half
years. All this is because I would rather not regret one of the
most important decisions of my life.

The “just out of high school” mentality was to pick
an interesting major with the potential for making enough money to
buy that Lexus. Then, you stroll into your three-man sardine can of
a dorm room on zero week and realize, “damn, I have to go to
a medical or law school too.” For those without a major
pre-selected from birth, the GE’s do not provide enough of an
overview to spark their interests in a different field. Expanding
the available course-requirements and allowing for experimentation
would insert a level of refreshing freedom in the current learning
environment.

As a wise man might have once said, “unnecessary
classes” and three bucks will get you a cup of joe at
Kerckhoff. American culture has made a graduate education so
obligatory that the undergraduate levels have become saturated.
Just as people were weeded out in high school, colleges are
churning out GPA whores to fill the growing number of graduate
schools across the country. Your four academic years at UCLA are
merely prep classes for another four years of higher, “higher
education” at another “Newsweek Top 25″ graduate
school.

Still, there is some hope for higher education. After all, I did
find a way to get Mondays and Fridays off next quarter.