JUST TRANSFER TO RUTGERS ALREADY.

I expect student columnists at sub-prime party schools to lament the classwork, but Princeton???  "Princeton’s mindless pursuit of academic rigor undermines student flourishing."  Faculty at the Ivies might well be pleased to encounter students who are not excellent sheep.  That's not the problem, though, rather it's the consequences of a coreless curriculum, or perhaps the pressure of bickering at the right eating clubs.

I’m not entirely sure, however, why Princeton feels the onus to create a high-aspiration environment. Doesn’t Princeton naturally create one when it selects less than 6 percent of 30,000 of the most ambitious applicants to join the first-year class each year? What’s more, does rigor ipso facto really create “thoughtful, resilient, and intelligent leaders?” I think not. Academic rigor and the challenges associated with it do not inherently create great leaders, and blindly pursuing academic rigor for its own sake is foolish.

First, there are more major and distribution requirements than students can handle in productive ways. Currently, all students must generally experience a minimum of one semester — or four if they are BSE — where they take five classes. It has become commonplace for students to take, what they refer to as “an easy fifth” to resolve both of the aforementioned requirements. What this “easy fifth” lingo suggests is that students are optimizing ease over intellectual interest to fulfill these rigorous requirements. In fact, I’ve heard countless instances in which my friends have told me they felt bad for submitting terrible academic work in the fifth class that they are PDFing but must take to hit all their distribution requirements.

That first paragraph puts me in mind of what I've learned about Japanese universities: the pecking order is more strictly defined than that in the States, and the pressure to get good grades in high school all the more severe, and thus university life in Japan is one long party, but you'd better be prepared to revert to that high school work model upon becoming novice salaryman.

Or perhaps the problem is that Princetonians can't establish their street cred?

I agree that such exposure is important, but if there are so many major and distribution requirements to the point where the onerous load begins to encroach upon the capacity for students to deliver high quality work in those requirements, it is likely time that we critically re-examine whether every single requirement meaningfully enriches our students.

Further, classes are known for assigning 200 or more pages of reading each week that frustrated students can barely finish, and I frequently hear students complain about extremely time-intensive problem sets that are unrelated to both lecture material or final examinations, causing me to wonder how these problem sets actually enrich students’ minds.

The implications of such rigor extend past students’ academic pursuits and into their extracurricular life. Often, we find that rigor either makes students less engaged in extracurriculars or, when they are actively involved, they must choose having strong extracurricular involvement over fulfilling academic involvement. On the one hand, Princeton students are often described by campus activists to be far less engaged with political protests than students at peer institutions, demonstrated — for example — by Princeton’s lackluster Divest protests compared to Yale, Harvard, or Penn.

"Too much reading" is always and everywhere a student lament, and a problem set that doesn't require the student to think outside the class notes and the assigned reading at least a little bit doesn't develop those intellectual muscles or critical thinking skills or what have you.  Not enough time to protest?  Check your privilege, as they say.  The grandchildren of the hippies are now in college, and it shows.

I’m currently taking a five-course semester, and I find that I’m frequently lowering the quality of work I submit for my five classes so that I can dedicate time to work on my nonprofit consulting project with the World Wildlife Fund. I’ve found that every hour spent on an unnecessary reading assignment or low-value class is an hour that could have been spent on a meaningful extracurricular pursuit.

The problem in the status quo is that professors are not held accountable to explain why an impossibly high amount of reading is assigned in the first place. The problem is that academic departments are not held responsible for justifying how their major prerequisites and departmentals actually enrich the student experience. As a consequence, the challenges that arise from academic rigor for its own sake don’t deliver a commensurate reward, instead inflicting a high burden that takes away time for students to double down on their academic interests and extracurricular goals.

There are probably Northern Illinois students covering the night shifts at the local warehouses right now.  That might be a more meaningful extracurricular pursuit than consulting with a non-profit, and it might pay better to boot.