There’s no such thing as an easy A.
You may think that asking around on Facebook groups, rummaging through sites like ratemyprofessor.com or searching course books for breezy leisure study classes about underwater basket weaving might be good for your transcripts.
And you know what? You’re right.
An easy course will get you an A, and in some cases, that’s all you need. If you’re teetering on the edge of your financial aid cutoff or a smidge below the GPA necessary to enter your academic program it might be worth throwing a few credit hours away as a sort of academic success lubricant.
But a transcript is not a résumé—you know, that thing that matters in the real world. Hard work is almost always better for personal and professional development.
Think for a minute about what trying, actually trying, in college means for your future. Odds are good you’re reading this newspaper somewhere around campus. Stop and look around. Half of the people in your immediate vicinity will find jobs after graduation. Half will not, according to an Associated Press analysis, which found 53.6 percent of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 were jobless or underemployed in 2011.
Which half do you think the people who search for the easiest way out will be a part of? Here’s a hint: Remember that Robert Frost poem accompanying every high school senior’s profile? That’s a useful parable.
But maybe it’s not your fault.
The image of the dusty, teacher-knows-all lecture hall of the past is fading as colleges everywhere build new, “infotainment” style programs designed to entertain as much as educate. Yale, Harvard and Bard teamed up this year to offer a class for freshmen called “Great Big Ideas,” which pulls together visionaries like science popularizer Michio Kaku and experimental psychologist Steven Pinker, combines them with eye-grabbing special effects and projects them onto giant video screens.
This semester, USF Tampa offered a class that uses Reddit—the world’s greatest waste of time—as an education platform.
Could it be that the problem all along was that colleges and universities weren’t teaching correctly? Are the pedagogies of Plato and the Socratic method relics of the past?
Many Americans would seem to agree. A survey conducted for Northeastern University found that three in four people are proud of American colleges, ranking them above institutions of higher education in other countries, but a full 83 percent said American higher education “needs to change to remain competitive.”
Peter Theil, an outspoken venture capitalist who co-founded Paypal, is so unconvinced about American colleges that he persuaded 24 young entrepreneurs to drop out and pursue their dreams—though he also gave them $100,000. Harvard Innovation Education Fellow Tony Wagner as much as agreed when he published a study in April that said American schools need to focus more teaching innovation and motivation than knowledge memorization.
Either way, a person who works hard to complete classes and participates on campus—think Van Wilder at the end of the movie—is more likely to succeed after college. Those easy A classes might seem easy at first, but they come with a hard lesson later on.
