CUNY Schools
Having completed the flagship
schools, I turn my attention to the localities where I have found the least use
of Friday. Columbia in New York City has
the least use of Friday in the Ivy League.
So I turned my attention to the CUNY schools to see how these less
selective schools rate this way. Generally
these schools don’t use Friday much either. (All observations are from Spring 014).
Their courses are mostly MW or TTh or one day, occasionally on Friday
but just as often on Saturday or Sunday.
If I encounter a weekend course, I count it as a Friday one, but even
counting this way, these schools have few courses that meet on "Friday." Some of the CUNY senior schools go back a
long way and are more prestigious and others are relatively new. Here are the schools and their percentages of
courses that meet on Friday (or the weekend) from oldest to newest. (Thanks to Wikipedia from which I copied this
display and added my data)
. (1847) City College 22 % F's, with pockets of more
traditional F's in physics and some languages
. (1870) Hunter College 34 % F's, higher than others around due frequency of TF,
mostly
.
(1919) Baruch College
15 % F's, typical CUNY mix of 3 hr F, Sa and Su (as City College’s School of
Business and Civic Administration, renamed in 1953 to honor Bernard M. Baruch)
.
(1930) Brooklyn College 11 % F's, typical CUNY(formed by the merger of Hunter and
City Colleges' Brooklyn campuses)
.
(1937) Queens College
23 % F's, typical CUNY
.
(1955) College
of Staten Island 23 % F's, typical CUNY
.
(1964) John Jay College of Criminal Justice 14 % F's, a few TF and ThF here
.
(1966) York College 25 % F's,
a few sciences have traditional MWF
.
(1968) Lehman College
13 % F's, typical CUNY (from (1931) Lehman was the Bronx branch of Hunter
College, known as Hunter-in-the-Bronx)
. (1970) Medgar Evers College 30 % F's, math is almost all F,
some TThF here
The oldest and newest of these
schools make the most use of Friday, which is still rather low compared to
traditional schools. The lowest use of
F's is still better than in Los Angeles but still rather low. As in LA, these schools may say that they
have four day weeks so commuting time is reduced. Maybe so, but what accounts for the range of
this use? Whatever the explanation, the
quality of education looks lower at
schools that pack their classes into a four day week and when possible it seems
wise for a student to choose and employers to hire from a school that looks
like it cares more about quality.
Here’s a suggestion for big city
schools: keep your four day week for
commuting purposes, but spread it out.
Have MTh and TF classes. Let
Wednesday be the open day, where perhaps some one day classes meet and when
students are more inclined to study.