College Courses

At the UCLA studio of the American Society of Civil Engineers, undergraduates are engaged in such difficult extracurricular projects as designing and building a 20-foot-long concrete canoe to race against other California college teams. But the young engineers face a potentially tougher challenge as University of California leaders consider a plan to charge these students more for their undergraduate education than most others at the university. As part of a plan to plug UC's battered budget, the regents may vote as early as next month on the controversial, tradition-breaking proposal to require engineering undergraduates, along with those studying business, to pay $900 more a year than the rest of the student body.

How well should people know each other before they have sex? In the biggest classroom at UC Santa Barbara, sociology professors John and Janice Baldwin are reeling off survey results showing that male and female students are almost equally willing to sleep with someone they love. But the hall erupts in knowing laughter as a gender gap emerges: Men, the long-married couple reports, remain eager for sex through descending categories of friendship and casual acquaintance. Women don't.

When Joaquin Lim landed in the northern Chinese city of Dalian a few months ago, a smiling airport official immediately ushered him off the plane and through immigration and customs before the rest of the passengers could even empty the cabin. When Lim arrived in the airport's terminal, he noticed a huge banner that read: "Welcome to Dalian Respected Teacher."

The weather is balmy, the local beaches are inviting, and so, naturally, San Diego State students are thinking about . . . accounting. Yes, accounting. It's become one of the hot courses on campus. Enrollment is up, one of the accounting lecturers has twice been named professor of the year, and several dozen students spent their summer mornings in a class poring over a 3-inch-thick tome titled "Federal Taxation."

The stampede of student athletes up Figueroa Street from USC to Los Angeles Trade Tech College nearly two miles away drew curious attention during summer school registration at the downtown community college last June. Among those signing up were three 300-pound Trojans linemen, including one with academic troubles at the university.

More California high school students are taking Advanced Placement tests for college credit, but the state's black and Latino students are still underrepresented in AP classrooms, according to a report released Tuesday by the College Board. Of the 358,266 students in the state's class of 2006, 31% took at least one AP exam, up from 22% in 2000. Nationally, about 24% of students took an AP test in 2006, compared to about 16% in 2000.

Harvard University proposed a curriculum overhaul Wednesday to emphasize sciences, religious beliefs and world cultures. The recommendations in a faculty committee final report come after years of internal debate over what courses should be required of all students at the nation's oldest college. The current core curriculum has been criticized for focusing on narrow academic questions rather than real-world issues.

On a recent Monday afternoon, two UCLA students stand before their class, performing a skit they've written about a pair of high school friends on graduation day in East Los Angeles. "I want to get out of the ghetto," one young woman excitedly tells her friend. "I think East Los will bring me down. It won't take me anywhere. I just see something bigger for myself." The other student is dismayed. Success doesn't mean forgetting your roots.

Equal but different. You hear that a lot on the lush green campus of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. God values men and women equally, any student here will tell you. It's just that he's given them different responsibilities in life: Men make decisions. Women make dinner. This fall, the internationally known seminary -- a century-old training ground for Southern Baptists -- began reinforcing those traditional gender roles with college classes in homemaking.

A fledgling alumni group headed by a former campus Republican leader is offering students payments of up to $100 per class to provide information on instructors who are "abusive, one-sided or off-topic" in advocating political ideologies. The year-old Bruin Alumni Assn. says its "Exposing UCLA's Radical Professors" initiative takes aim at faculty "actively proselytizing their extreme views in the classroom, whether or not the commentary is relevant to the class topic."