More students stick with CGS after referral

“I’m more interested in my major related classes,” Murdock said. “I would recommend CGS to people unsure what they’re doing.”

BU spokesman Colin Riley said most CGS students were referred after being rejected from their target schools. A two-year liberal arts program, CGS places students into small learning groups and offers core classes in natural science, social science, humanities and rhetoric.

“Students benefit from studying in a two-year program with classmates and teachers that they are grouped within that period,” Riley said.

Riley added CGS students complete a semester-long project in the spring of their sophomore year.

“CGS students have a lot of academic work throughout the two years,” he said.

Fifteen percent of freshmen were admitted to CGS, and more than 65 percent of those students had not directly applied to the general studies program. Liberal arts programs in large universities are progressively growing, according to a Jan. 20 New York Times article Jan. 20.

“[CGS] provides an opportunity for students, who [might] not have been accepted into their first choice of school at BU, to enroll in a small liberal arts school . . . and later matriculate into the school they originally applied to,” Riley said.

New York University’s similar two-year program has increased 55 percent over the last decade, with 100 percent of their liberal arts students having been referred, according to the article.

Helen Lee, a sophomore in CGS, said she remembers weighing out the pros and cons of a two-year liberal arts education.

“I very well could have chosen Core [Curriculum] at [the College of Arts and Sciences], but CGS won hands down,” Lee said in an email interview. “The professors and the environment were much more appealing to me.”

Its students can also benefit from the broad liberal base and additional electives its program offers, said CGS freshman Mike Parello.

“The worst thing is it’s like a binding contract,” he said. “You can’t transfer out of it until the two years is out.”

As a prospective film and TV student, Murdock said he feels the program prevents him from focusing on his major as much as he would like to.

“If you know your major, you might feel held back,” he said.

Parello decided on CGS because changing his mind after getting an associate’s degree from a community college would be tougher than committing to CGS, where he has more flexibility at BU after he completes the program.

“As a potential pre-med student, the other programs I was looking into were very intense and directed toward sciences, so if I decided to change my mind it would’ve been tough,” Parello said. “With CGS, I can.”

Riley said school is just as academically difficult as BU’s other colleges, but structured differently.

Parello said he considers CGS students to be the same as those in other schools.

“There are the same students in your classes, and you get to know professors a

lot better,” Parello said. “There is also a lot of collaboration between your professors.”

However, CGS freshmen scored 100 points lower on average on the SAT, the article stated. These students also earned GPA of about 3.4, where their peers weighed in at 3.7.

Based off statistics like these, Lee said she thinks people often have misconceptions about the students in CGS.

“The bad reputation associated with the program either comes from bitter resentment of some sort of unawareness,” Lee said.

While Murdock also noted its reputation, he said people tend to exaggerate the differences between CGS and the other schools.

“I get jokes like, ‘Oh, do you like to study generally?’” Murdock said. “It gets a bad rep, but it’s really not that bad.”