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Comment by purple-again | Hacker News Reader

Umm...the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida is not an easy school to get into. While no where near Ivy league levels its still considered the best public school in Florida and most high school kids try their hand at getting in there before settling on UCF or USF (orlanda and tampa respectively). To a lesser degree the same is true of Miami though a lot of students there prefer FIU for the culture.

UF's business program takes a TINY portion of community college transfers each year and sadly most of them fail out of the weed out courses in the first year.

I am very skeptical of how many Walmart employees will be able to take advantage of this program. Can anyone with experience at the other schools listed in this article speak to the difficulty of getting in to them?

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My understanding of colleges is that they tend to accept pretty much anyone if they aren't coming straight from high-school. The idea is that people who have lived in the Real World™ who choose to go to college understand why an education is important and will naturally work hard for their degree (because they see it as one of their last chances to escape from whatever situation lead to them applying), whereas high-schoolers only want to go because they've been told they have to in order to be successful.

Obviously this isn't true for true Ivy-league schools, but it does tend apply even to larger state schools, such as the ones in this article.

Also, many high schoolers coming in are playing with "house money" - easy credit for student loans, daddy's money, and scholarships and grants focused at high school kids.

Adults going in and paying their way are more likely to stay focused and complete.

> Obviously this isn't true for true Ivy-league schools,

25% of Ivy League students are there because their parents are rich alumni, so it does apply to Ivy League schools too.

Business school has weeder courses? Maybe algebra? I thought that was strictly engineering.

you're forgetting chem/bio majors and organic chem

Heh. I started out interested in biomedical engineering. The Biomedical part lasted until I took organic chemistry. I wasn't especially horrible at it but I sure didn't like it.

Statistics

Stats, Intermediate Accounting, Microeconomic Theory are a couple of the 'weeder' courses off the top of my head.

I did tutoring while I was getting my MBA. Yep. Basically the first year quant courses: stats, micro, accounting, finance, ops. There were students I tutored whose math basically ended with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. I actually had one ask me to explain graphs (as in cartesian coordinates) to them.

You can also find a number of books written about 1st year MBA experiences on this general theme.

This is the saddest thing I've read today. Also could you provide book titles?

Snapshots from Hell: The Making of an MBA by Peter Robinson

This isn't the one I was thinking of and I only found it because I vaguely know the author.

Peter Cohen's The Gospel According to the Harvard Business School is another older one.

There's a third I was thinking of but I don't see it on my shelf and it seems to be Google resistant.

Thanks and also did you tutor undergrads or fellow MBA's? Wasn't exactly clear but sounds like the latter.

Latter. So college graduates but woefully weak in even basic math.

At the time, the school (which was a moderately elite one) even had a "math camp" prior to classes beginning for those who weren't comfortable with their math skills. But obviously there's not a lot you can do for students who are essentially at a grade school level.

Ha ha, well the business majors being weeded out with college algebra, was supposed to be a joke. Sadly it seems true.

Tangentially related to community college and weeder classes. In my experience the older you are the more flexible the school is in transferring credits so you may not have to take those.

Since Walmart is a national company, this is almost certainly and "online" program separate from the on-campus classes.

what about FIT (as a school)?

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