In Canada when I attended university there used to not be any “gen ed” requirements (at least not at any universities I was aware of). Students were free to take whatever elective courses they so chose. In more recent years however I’ve been seeing more and more universities having mandatory breadth requirements. They aren’t universal by any means and they can vary quite a bit, but they are popping up more and more.
Some universities require a specific number of credits in each of the traditional fields of study (Social Sciences, Humanities, Sciences), whereas other schools have established thematic topics with courses offered from across the various departments/faculties in each category that can be chosen. For my kids’ universities specifically, for the older one their requirements were minimal only needing to choose 3 first year courses from a list of courses from within the faculty that were separate from the courses required for the major. The younger one is doing an accredited Engineering program which has it’s own specific requirements but they conform to those of the university as a whole which has a mandatory “Liberal Studies” distribution that students must fulfill by taking courses from a prescribed list. The number of courses in the distribution varies by program and in their case they are required to take 4, 1 per year. In addition to those, the degree itself has a few additional professional development courses that are required.
I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand I do think requiring a more broad education in addition to the requirements of the major can be a good thing, but on the other hand I feel that by the time students get to university they should be able to make up their own minds as to what to take as part of their electives. When I attended university I took advantage of my electives to explore a whole range of different courses in topics outside of my major. My older kid who was a STEM major but who has broad interests and I thought would do similarly, only ended up taking a few Humanities courses as part of their free electives however. Much fewer than I was hoping they would take. They mostly concentrated their free electives on taking additional courses in their major to turn it into a 'specialist degree" in order to make themselves more competitive for admission to graduate school. Their other reason for not taking more humanities courses though they would have enjoyed them, was that they didn’t want them to impact their GPA again in order to be more competitive for admission to grad school. The younger one due to the nature of their degree really didn’t have much choice in the matter. I’m not sure given a freedom of choice that they would have chosen more Liberal Studies courses though they did enjoy the ones they took (mostly in the Social Sciences).