What kind of education did Trump get at Wharton?
We all know Trump isn't very bright, certainly nowhere near as bright as he thinks he is. I have been struck by his ignorance of basic cultural norms, of things *everyone* knows--cocktail party conversation-type stuff. He often mentions things that everyone knows by starting out, "very few people know" which indicates of course that *he* didn't know. He doesn't show evidence of any kind of critical thinking, of being able to synthesize information, even of understanding cause and effect. These are skills that are taught in high school and in liberal arts college courses. Business degrees are a little like trade-school certification in that the point is to prepare the student for a specific kind of work--like a medical or legal degree does.
Trump likes to talk about being a graduate of Wharton. I know one person who has a bachelor's degree from Wharton--most people who mention their Wharton degrees are talking about an MBA--and he is woefully ignorant about literature, despite being an avid reader, and the other arts. Trump seems to be like this, too.
I visited the Wharton website to find out what the requirements are for earning a degree, and not surprisingly there is very little non-business material on that list. There is one required course (and that a seminar) of critical writing, a requirement for competence in one foreign language--not a course, but a test--and a couple a courses outside Wharton's business curriculum. These could be biology and geology.
He brags about being a graduate of an Ivy League university without having been touched by the skills and understanding that are the entire point of an Ivy League education.
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its MBA program.
It's not hard to imagine how Trump got through undergrad, though. Just like so many don't belong in college.
We watched a number of kids with zero intellectual interest grow up and then go off to college to get their social marker. Southern California has a bunch of colleges and universities, but we learned the names of colleges we'd seldom heard of as most of these spread out around the country to institutions that would accept them. It became a chuckle over the years as we waited to hear where the next child would end up.
Lol, "stupid as a cork." Dumb as a bag of rocks here. Or to really get it across, dumb as two bags of rocks.
To be fair, I took econ 101 (macro) at a community college, and that was the toughest single course I've ever taken to that point. First time I ever had to really struggle to understand, but the class was interesting because no one had to study to pass if they didn't want to.
The professor makes me smile to remember,and he always seemed amused by us. He was really good and his lectures worth sitting in for. But he knew most in his giant classes were unambitious business majors getting their tickets to ordinary jobs, while others were getting general ed classes out of the way for low cost before transferring to universities for various fields of study.
So students could earn a C by memorizing a few definitions and being able to remember the answers to multiple choice questions in the workbook, same questions on the tests. B's required a lot more, though, required remembering and understanding the material, A performances with any other econ professor. To get an A, people had to have all the regular material plus extra readings that pushed beyond nailed back and forth to be able to solve problems not presented before. Huge leaps between levels. Not Wharton or Penn, but some students planning transfer to economics programs at places like UCLA or Pomona chose to kick off with this guy's classes. Or maybe their parents decided. An entire semester cost residents about $50, not including books.
Different worlds.
studying econ, at least once past. I once considered majoring in economics and urban studies, go for advanced degrees all that, but instead followed my need to pull in an income and motherhood. At that time, a mere undergrad degree in urban studies would have gotten me a job in some planning department designing strip mall ingress or something.
If I could do it again, I'd study along the lines of cultural geography (my favorite-ever class and lots of overlap with anthropology) and be part of the explosion of knowledge. The possibilities just within that vague framework are so incredibly wide, I have no idea what I'd be working on now. But I choose to assume I would be part of it, and without doubt it'd be exciting.
