-
There may be additional requirements with respect to course difficulty. With respect to the sciences, we may require at least one course to be at the 200 level (advanced survey). In the social sciences and humanities, there may be a requirement for a 400-level course (advanced and writing-intense, though the SS and Hum courses tend to be writing-intense anyway…). I would, of course, confer with deans to find out how much depth should be attained in the general ed requirements. The main focus would be on breadth.
-
My initial inclination is to not shove Stats/Finite Math down every kid’s throat, though certainly they are beneficial. They would, of course, be options for the 2nd math course requirement.
-
At CoP, our Philosophy courses would apply Philosophy basics to current issues. As such, it would be housed among the Social Sciences. (just kidding – you are right: it is more a Humanity)
-
We’re going to lump Lit and Comms with the Humanities because writing and speaking (and persuading) are art forms.
-
Ideally, kids would choose to fulfill their Ethnic Studies requirement by studying a culture/ethnicity different from theirs. The aim is to broaden horizons thereto. However, that would be nearly impossible to enforce.
I believe in general education requirements. My kids both benefited from taking interesting courses outside of their field of study.
I also like the idea of a common freshman experience where everyone has to take one of a couple of courses as sort of “how to read, write, think in college” tool. I took one my freshman year that was co-taught by a philosophy professor and an art history professor and it was definitely one of the best classes I took.
I would prefer that. I am admittedly an “AP skeptic.” Not a huge fan of high school AP courses generally, and specifically not a fan of them being used once in college to place out of Gen Ed or entry level required classes. In my fantasy college, the gen ed requirements I listed would be required to be taken in college, and would be higher level classes than the AP classes taught in high school.
I do agree with this, too. I don’t love high school AP courses and believe they are, in most cases, pedagogically inferior to their college counterparts. But, I do know they are used as a way to reduce costs in college, in which case they may be a necessary evil.
I attended a college with some solid general education requirements (UCSD Revelle) and have never regretted the broad foundation they gave me.
My three kids all specialized more in college. One used a heap of AP credit to complete bachelor’s and masters in 4 years and didn’t take any gen Ed’s at college. The second used the pile of AP credit to study abroad twice-her way of getting a broader education-and also graduated early. Her college also had extensive gen Ed’s and she did take some. One of the most valuable, she says, was a business communications class she took while abroad in Hungary. Those two kids made the most of what the AP curriculum can offer students. Third kid was a music ed major, didn’t have the AP credit (except calc BC), and probably leans to the side of doing the bare minimum in the gen Ed’s, and yet he still benefitted from what he learned in some of them. He absolutely loved the logic class (not an easy A, but for the kid who surprise loved “word math” it worked), and finally did learn how to write without anxiety after being required to write things enough times in four years.
There’s more than one way to get an education, and a solid general education is one of the good ways.
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).
Very interesting. I think this underscores one of the complexities here is the inevitable competition among students for various next-step opportunities. One might plausibly reason that the institution setting some sort of core or distributional requirement basically levels the playing field such that you don’t have to worry about that competitive process discouraging breadth.
Unfortunately that would only work if every university required breadth distributions since most students aren’t applying to their undergraduate institutions for graduate school. The saddest trend I’ve seen in the “maintain high GPA at any cost to get into grad/professional school” arms race is students whose only criteria for taking an elective be that it be a “bird” course.
At least in the US, most colleges actually do have some sort of breadth requirements. There are really only a small fraction of colleges with a truly “open curriculum” (although a few more have a specialized program for a subset of students). And I think the nature of those particular colleges is such that they believe this is not a big problem for them, including believing that through admissions (either to the college or the special program as relevant), they can mostly select for kids planning to use the open curriculum for exploration anyway.
However, the volume and rigor level varies across colleges. For example, MIT and Harvey Mudd have relatively high volume and high rigor in their general education requirements, compared to many other colleges.
A pre-med or pre-law student focused on protecting their GPA may favor a college with a lower volume of less rigorous general education requirements over a college which has more rigorous general education requirements in subjects that the student is not as strong in.
One other aspect of general education requirements:
The rigor of a college can be defined as the minimum rigor of the course work required to graduate (allowing any choice of major available at the college). This means that a college’s general education requirements will affect how rigorous the college is, if they set a baseline of rigor higher than what one may find by choosing the least rigorous courses possible without restriction alongside the least rigorous major.
For Canadian public universities there tends not to be a great variability in rigour across the various schools. Certainly some will offer the ability to take more rigorous versions of courses, but the baseline tends to be more or less the same with the exception of a few specific programs. Engineering and Nursing for example, being accredited programs, won’t vary significantly regardless of which university you attend. The belief that you can attend a less selective university in order to secure a higher GPA and thus make you more competitive for admission to post-graduate study (read med school) is persistent but misinformed. The quality of education you will receive at the vast majority of universities is relatively similar. What will differ is the ability of your peers and the breadth of course offerings. As a result “prestige”, as much as it can be said to exist for Canadian universities at the undergraduate level, is mostly a function of admissions selectivity. Outside of a handful of premiere programs, the view that employers view graduates from more selective universities as being superior to those that are less selective, is mostly a myth perpetuated by high school students and their status seeking parents.
This is only partially true.
There are colleges which require a senior thesis or significant research project to graduate. There are colleges which are very strict on which AP credits (if any) they accept, much to the chagrin of students who thought the AP Bio they took in 10th grade was going to get them out of Freshman bio. There are colleges where the placement tests taken before Freshman year begins are MORE rigorous than the AP’'s, and colleges where you can’t “double dip” (take a class you already took in HS for credit, or get credit for a course you took at another institution over the summer).
Etc.
The Gen Ed’s are only a piece of the rigor puzzle.
This brings up another aspect: do broad access universities have different constraints or considerations for setting general education requirements than the elite universities commonly focused on here?
Students at broad access universities are:
- More likely to have deficient high school preparation, so may need more general education (e.g. additional English or math courses), but also may be less capable of rigorous course work outside of their interests.
- More likely to be financially stressed, so that any extra course work could be unaffordable and prevent them from graduating at all.
Absolutely.
I was a grad student (for a shockingly long time) in a top program for my field, but at a university that was good but not too selective for college (although it has since gotten more selective). I started as a TA, but eventually was teaching my own classes (a whole other issue), and I also sat on a committee where things like budgets and their interplay with course requirements were discussed.
There are definitely all sorts of practical considerations in a context like that. Like, the undergrads at this college were required to take a course in my field in part because that meant ample funding for grad students which was part of how they were able to maintain a top PhD program in my field. And there was no way to test out of this. Good for my program, and seen as an unnecessary burden (including sometimes financially) by many of the undergrads.
And then there was the writing issue. Lots of the first years were just not remotely prepared yet for college level writing. So they had all sorts of ways of addressing that, and actually a lot of the undergrad courses in my field were tagged as writing intensive courses that could help fill another requirement. Again, good for our program financially, but it was sometimes very challenging getting some kids up to speed on college level writing.
This is just one focused example at one college, but it was definitely a case where these requirements were being set in light of all sorts of other institutional concerns. And I am pretty confident that something like this is always going on behind the scenes.
Some or many colleges do have multiple entry points for the college writing course requirements, based on placement testing (which may or may not use SAT, ACT, or AP scores), which could result in different students needing different numbers or credits of college writing courses.
Math and foreign language also typically has multiple entry points based on prior preparation.
This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. If you’d like to reply, please flag the thread for moderator attention.