Reply to Engineering schools that won’t crush my child’s soul

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Hi professor.

I feel bad that you don’t get what this thread is about.

A lot of parents are still teaching their kids what to care about and look out for, what to weigh and balance as they enter adulthood. And I hope most of us recognize that if we offer suggestions to our children they often don’t have the independent knowledge to challenge what we tell them, go “do their own research,” or have some Jedi-esque passion well up in them to direct their lives.

Are you, or we, or society, interested in have our kids gain the skills to make a livelihood within?[b] Are we sending them to compete in their profession as if it were a varsity sport? Are we sending them to a gatekeeping guild to be hazed and judged worthy[/b]? Are we sending them to be taught to think in ways that they have not considered before?

I believe it is all of these things, at various levels, and people can disagree about which is a priority.

I would hope not to have my children taught by someone who thinks pedagogy is a primarily about making life difficult for adolescents and seeing how they respond.

Basically, I can understand how a proud professional from a given field would have a hard time separating hazing would-be new entrants in their field from best practices in actual education. But since that’s not the right approach, I’m going to look out for me and mine.

Good luck as an educator and professional in your field. 
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You are sending them to learn how to deal with the inevitable competition that will face them in the job market, or phd/grad admissions. It is not hazing to have tough courses and assign C's to those who are barely mastering the material. 
It is a bigger problem for easier-admission schools to accept a student into the school of engineering and then have 30-40% of the students unable to master the first-year calc/physics material at a 3.0GPA cutoff to get into the major.  That is not gate-keeping, it is poor admissions that are not assessing the skills of the applicants correctly, due to high school grade inflation as well as test-optional, as well as having to fill seats! Some of the less-popular engineering schools with over 60% admission yet under 25% yield have had to admit more at a lower bar just to get seats filled. The DCUM view that these schools are somehow less toxic because they do not have the cut-throat reputation of T20 is patently false when a large portion are unable to make the GPA to get the degree. Admission does not care if they are forced out of engineering into an easier major.

Better for you as a parent to accurately help your student figure out in high school if he or she has the raw math, physics, and chem competence to pursue engineering in the first place, rather than look for a perceived easier-entry school that is magically not going to be difficult coursework. 
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