Originally, the reason for implementing Gen Eds in the US colonies/US higher education was because college prep education was so hit-or-miss or unavailable that what was originally considered something to be covered before college ended up being part of the early stages of one’s undergrad education. In the UK and many other countries, gen-eds are something which were supposed to have been offered and completed by one’s college prep high school at the very latest.
That’s largely due to a combination of past historical factors of slavery and racial discrimination combined with the fact our education system’s curricula is so decentralized, often focused on the academically LCD, and dependent on local property taxes.
Result…public and private K-12 systems with an exceedingly wide variation in academic rigor/quality whereas in most other countries which much more centralized education systems and funding systems, the variation between K-12 systems is far less/practically non-existent.
One pediatrician I had who was educated in a central European country stated in a discussion on this topic that in his home country, funding and educational standards were set such that an “A” from a rural college-prep high school in the sticks was equal to an “A” from a college-prep high school in his home country’s capital city. Quite in contrast to how even in my home city of NY…an A from one high school is likely to be a C, D, or even F in another.
And from my cousins observation of the public and local private K-12 schools in their area of Mississippi would make a mediocre NYC public high school curriculum look academically elite in comparison.
And this isn’t a recent phenomenon. Back in the 19th century, concerns over raising academic admission standards to reduce the problem of flunkouts/disciplinary problems being “too elitist” combined with the uneven distribution of adequate college-prep education even among the upper/upper-middle classes…such as scions of plantation owners meant the “most PC” solution briefly implemented ~ a decade before the Civil War was to make West Point a 5-year program so there’s an extra year allowed to provide remedial education/gen-eds for incoming cadets whose prior education was considered deficient by the admissions/academic board. West Point’s brief 5-year program experiment ended right before the first guns of the Civil War were fired in anger.