US student loan crisis

[Poundsand]

@Taiwan_Luthiers

Almost every classes that you take in the first two year of college is little more than a review of high school. Particularly government and history classes (which all public school requires), “college algebra”, even precalculus, foreign language, etc… Those are taught in high school, should have been taught well in high school. Instead you waste no less than 30 semester hours on them. All majors have to take them, doesn’t matter if it’s useless liberal arts or engineering degrees.

So… looking at UT’s site, things like regular old algebra and precalculus are not exactly generally required - they’re required if you’re not ready for the college level classes. Looks like at UT they require a single math class, and you can take things like data science or a regular calc class. There does appear to be a couple basic history classes required, but after that, you have a choice of some electives that I’m sure aren’t high school equivalent. So if you have 2 years of high school classes, uh, yeah,.you’re either doing a lot of remedial work, or purposely sandbagging.

@Taiwan_Luthiers

Just for any given degrees at UT Austin you can strip out at least 60 semester hours from the degree if you excluded these high school review classes. Not to say we should just spend 2 years to get a bachelor’s but without AP credits you actually need 5 years to graduate if you were starting from scratch (and taking a reasonable course load).

IIRC, you previously defined reasonable as 13 hours - that’s the MINIMUM required to be considered full time. Sorry, but no.

@Taiwan_Luthiers

Not all engineers needs to minor in English literature… but too often you almost had to minor in English literature regardless of your major.

A whopping 6 hours of English comp and core writing is required. Most people would be well served with more.

https://catalog.utexas.edu/undergraduate/undergraduate-studies/academic-policies-and-procedures/#corecurriculum