Reply to Did you review the curriculum for DC's major?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm a professor and have served as a program director, department chair, and on several curriculum committees. I also have a first-year student in college (not mine).

Parents, do NOT do this. If you are worried about your child maximizing their college experience, encourage them to speak to their professors, the department chair, their academic advisors, and older students in their major. When they have the opportunity to choose electives, they should aim for a balance of fulfilling requirements for their intended major and also should take a class outside of their major from a professor who has a reputation for being an excellent teacher (use word of mouth for this, NOT ratemyprofessor). 
As a parent, you really likely have little understanding of why the major is structured the way it is. There are factors that you likely have not considered (such as availability of certain faculty, accreditation concerns, budgeting issues, class sizes, etc.) that affect curriculum. 
As for hiring or graduate school, in many cases a student's recommendation from professors, internships, and GPA are important. For many jobs, content is learned on site, not in a classroom. Employers are looking for trainability and skills that can't be taught easily at work, like the ability to write well.

[/quote] The question is regarding students who haven't committed yet. I agree having prospective students (try to) talk to their department chairs is a good idea - if the chair is willing to talk to a non-student, they'll likely be willing to talk to a current student.

But what exactly is OP suggesting that you're saying is bad? Even if availability of certain faculty, budgeting issues, or class sizes are the reasons why a program is less rigorous than others, that doesn't change the fact that the program is less rigorous than others. 
"Employers are looking for trainability and skills that can't be taught easily at work, like the ability to write well" - all the more reason to make sure your child goes somewhere where they will learn to write well, even if they "only" take the minimum writing required by the school. This will require investigating the colleges requirements and the expectations of the required courses they will be taking. Frankly, it's unrealistic to expect every student to do this - and it's the students who are the least likely to do this to whom parents are and should hold the most concern for.[/quote]
It's hard to say what's "rigorous" from the outside. For some people, looking at a syllabus and seeing only a few texts might seem less rigorous than a syllabus with a ton of readings; but so much depends on what the professor does in that class, how difficult the readings are, how class discussions are conducted, how writing is graded and taught.
It's also impossible to tell from the outside how well writing is taught. Unless your child is attending a SLAC where students must take small seminars and write papers constantly no matter what the major, your child could easily get through college with writing only a handful of short papers, especially if majoring in STEM subjects - you wouldn't know this from reading a course catalog unless you sincerely believe that fulfilling one "writing intensive" course in order to graduate will guarantee a solid writer at the end of college. But, que the large state school boosters, every university is going to boast that students learn how to write if you read their curricular requirements.
Your best bet is to look at job and grad school placement trends. If a school has a long track record of excellent employment and a long track record of rate of admissions into graduate programs, that is going to be much more telling than the opinion of a random parent who has not stepped foot in a college classroom for over two decades.
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