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New 'Academic Redshirt' For Engineering Undergrads at UW
vinces99 writes "Redshirting isn't just for athletes anymore. The University of Washington and Washington State University are collaborating on an 'academic redshirt' program that will bring dozens of low-income Washington state high school graduates to the two universities to study engineering in a five-year bachelor's program. The first year will help those incoming freshmen acclimate to university-level courses and workload and prepare to major in an engineering discipline."
An athletic "redshirt" means you get to practice with the team but you're not allowed to compete, and it doesn't count as a year of eligibility.
Are they saying that you get to audit all of your classes as a freshman and then take them for real the next year? If not, then they're probably misusing the term redshirt. If so, then it's "welcome to whose degree is it anyway? the major where everything is made up and the grades don't matter"
Well, back at my old school, we had three tracks for Calc: "HMSS", aimed at the Arts-n-crafts and Business majors (literally, Humanities, Management, and Social Science): 4 semesters, nothing more that double integrals. The "Standard" track, for Engineering and Science students: 3 semesters, through triple integrals and polar coordinates, and the Braniac Track, the Standard Track in a 2-semester course. The problem, as **I** see it, is the societal urge to send everyone to college. That, at least in my opinion, is a mistake. We have a serious lack of people in the skilled trades and technician roles, and this need will grow as more mundane manufacturing and even office tasks are automated out of existence. For example: Sysadmins and Network Engineers would likely be better served by a mostly-hands on curriculum, but with other crucial skills like programming and breaking tasks down into individual actions. I speak as a guy with a Bachelor's, Masters, and about half of my Ph.D done: degrees for all too many skills are really just HR differentiators and proof you can accomplish long and complex tasks, with some direction. . .
Alternately, why don't we teach the kids in high school the things they need to learn in high school so they aren't playing catch up when they go to college?
Nobody is arguing that we shouldn't try and prepare everyone well before they get to college, but the simple fact is that we (at the universities) get these underprepared students every year, and that is unlikely to change soon. Rather than just throw blame at others and tell them to fix it, this is a proactive approach: what can *we* (at the universities) do about this problem? We'll all be ecstatic when K-12 education improves to make this a moot point, but until then we shouldn't just ignore the problem.