Boston Schools
Having completed
the flagship schools, I turned my attention to the localities where I found
the least use of Friday. Harvard has
among the lowest use of Friday in the Ivy League. Is this to reduce commuting time as might be
argued in LA and NYC, other (even bigger) big cities. In NYC and LA I limited
my comparisons to four year state schools.
In Boston the only school of this sort is U Mass Boston. (I didn’t count the College of Art and Design
this way.) Of course there are many
private schools and I choose to look also at the most elite of these, MIT. Of interest, these schools are much more
respectable in their use of Friday. In Spring 14 MIT
had 46 percent of its courses meet on Friday but there is a marked difference
between its humanities courses and the engineering courses. This is the same as we see across the country; engineering
schools and programs seem to think traditional schedules are important. They still use the MWF sequence while the
shift to MW courses is popular in most of the rest of academia. U Mass Boston has pockets where MW courses
are popular but like flagship schools it has resisted the four day week. 43
percent (S14) of its courses meet on Friday in S14.
That is very similar to U Mass Amherst, which had 40 percent of its
course meet on Friday in F012.
So Boston is
different from NYC and LA. The slide
toward a four day week is much less pronounced.
Maybe the slide has little to do with big city commuting cost. Maybe it’s just a desire for a three-day
weekend. Let’s look at other big
cities, like Chicago.