The Three Types of College Courses

I’ve had a particular type of conversation with several friends and students over the years. It’s always met with a mix of emotions. Sometimes disbelief. Sometimes outrage. Sometimes with a sense of revelation.

The conversation covers an open secret of academia. Namely, the three types of college courses. I don’t mean electives versus required courses and whatever the third option would be. I mean the attrition courses, the regular courses, and the filler courses.

Officially, filler and attrition courses don’t exist, and you’d be hard pressed to find a professor willing to admit to their usage. However, they exist at every college and university, and they exist for the same reasons. So, buckle-up for a fun filled ride on the bureaucracy express.

I’ve attended four universities, plus one online, in the pursuit of my college degree. So, I feel like I’ve seen enough to write about this.

The first type of course you may take in college, and these unfortunately exist at every level, is an attrition course. These are nefarious little buggers for a number of reasons. The foremost reason is that they are more than likely a required course. Take Ocean Engineering at Florida Tech as an example. When I took the course, it was a 1000 level course with no prerequisites. It was advertised as a soft, timid introduction to engineering while teaching students about the inner-workings of the oceans and their beautiful place in the world.

That’s exactly what a student who has never been away from home looks forward to. Something simple, yet fulfilling.

In reality, students needed to have taken at least calculus 1, physics, chemistry, and have a knowledge of flow rates if they have any hope of succeeding. The professor even said as much on the first day of class. The instructor knew his purpose and told those of us who discovered we were unprepared, through no fault of our own, that we were better off just dropping the course than dragging everyone else down on the group assignments. Nice guy.

Foreign language can be another attrition course. At Florida Tech, students in every major are required to pass two semesters of a foreign language. The problem is that there are no official tutors for any of the foreign languages offered. If a student struggles, they are on their own. Self-motivation is the key to surviving attrition courses.

All attrition courses operate under the principle that it’s better for a university to find the one genius in a class instead of bothering to train a dozen others to reach that level. It’s a cost/benefit analysis. If you can weed out the people fast enough, all you have left at the end are the cream of the crop. You don’t have to invest the resources in helping them succeed since they did all the work themselves. Attrition courses are designed for the majority of students to fail. If it’s a required course for multiple majors, it’s guaranteed to be an attrition course.

The second type of course is the regular type.

A regular college course is what you would expect. Students attend class, put in the effort, maybe ask for some tutoring here and there, then finish the semester all the better for it. Both electives and required courses can fit into this category. A prospective student can usually determine if a course is normal by checking websites that rate professors. Regular courses teach you as well as create more balanced human beings. At Florida Tech, Dr. Yuran teaches a course called Technical Communication, and that was the definitive regular college course for me that semester. Some classes were boring as hell, while others kept me interested all class period. Difficulty fluctuated appropriately too. The course felt right.

The last type of courses are filler courses. The severity of these depends on the individual university. These are the exact opposite of attrition courses. These are the courses that ensure campuses maintain a minimum GPA and guarantee star athletes will be able to play without distractions like learning. I believe there are universities that don’t have these types of class, but I’ve yet to see them. The University of West Florida has an interesting filler course. I took an 8 a.m. class called Introduction to Music in Film and to be fair, I loved that class. I took it because I wanted to. I actually wished it had a second level because I learned a lot and had fun. When you start the day with the theme to the movie Patton, you know it’s going to be a good day.

Unfortunately, it served another purpose. On the very first day of class, every football player who took the class, which seemed like most of them, approached the instructor to shake his hand and inform him, “We’re the football team.”

And that was the last those players ever attended the class.

The class was taught in an auditorium that held a couple hundred people. You wouldn’t notice that someone was missing in this massive class unless you were looking for them. Plus, attendance was taken by electronic clickers each student had to buy. I regularly saw students with five or more of these clickers ensuring all their friends passed attendance.

My public relations class at Florida Tech is also a filler course. It is probably the single worst taught class I’ve ever had. I may write a standalone article on it, some day. Suffice to say, I’ve learned nothing, hate every moment, and currently have a 99.23% grade. A good way to verify your class is a filler course is to intentionally submit incomplete homework, or even homework from previous assignments instead, and still receive a perfect score. There’s a reason I know this… but I do not condone it.

Colleges have become a business. Gone are the days when someone could go to one and discover what kind of person they really were. Today, you’re expected to declare your major before you even state your name. Then, immediately after you graduate, bestow money and prestige upon the university every time they whip out the alumni call sheet.

And for some people, that’s okay.

Personally, I went to college to learn. To learn about things I didn’t know and learn about myself. Yes, I went for that scrap of paper that magically opens up 95% of the job market just like everybody else, but I would be lying if I said I never thought to myself, “Screw it.”

And more often than not, I said that as I slogged my way through yet another attrition course.