On board the Tech Age

Though the University is content that students are prepared to handle post-college finances, the mere need to create special programs to teach them demonstrates that there is a whole in the curriculum in this area and that students are only haphazardly learning these skills. There is currently a shortage of courses that are actively geared towards teaching professional and technical skills necessary for everyday life in a modern, technical world.

While courses at Tufts generally do a good job providing important knowledge and analytical skills for the 21st century by tying in recent trends and current issues happening outside the boundaries of Walnut Hill, there is a noticeable lack of specific courses, such as basic finance, internet technology, and web design, to name a few, that could provide students with useful and highly relevant skills in the post-graduate professional world.

When curricula include dynamic, hands-on options taught either by professors or by specialized professionals brought in from the working world, students' opportunities to broaden skills and apply tools that are increasingly necessary both in and out of the world of academia are immediately expanded. Tufts should encourage these types of courses and offer more of them alongside its current, more traditional curriculum.

One way to do this would be to allow existing courses, such as the accounting course in the Economics Department and the stock market class in the Ex College, to count for the math distribution. There is currently a lack of interesting courses that fill that requirement, as the options for students for students are the useless Math for Social Choice class and banal statistics in various departments. The Tufts curriculum would greatly benefit from courses that challenge students to think about math issues that they find interesting to them instead of useless courses taken to fill the requirement. The chances of broad courses like basic finance in providing useful, relevant tools that all students would find helpful and immediately applicable are surely greater than some of the more traditional math offerings that are not necessarily attractive to all students.

Tufts should therefore make a strong attempt to incorporate courses into curricula that specifically teach the relevant skills and tools we must increasingly apply in a fast-paced, technological age. In doing so, it will truly be able to boast its reputation as a well-rounded institution that fosters cutting-edge education.