<p>“If you don’t have general education requirements, it’s just a trade school.”</p>
<p>This is a pretty weak argument since most of the world’s universities don’t have general education requirements.</p>
<p>@rhandco, You really think the only difference between a trade school graduate and a college graduate is general education? So if the electricians took all required general eds for an electrical engineering degree, whamo, they’d become electrical engineers? I don’t think so. A college education (to me) is about learning about something at a higher level. To some, I guess that might mean learning more about various areas of life as well as the central subject you are studying. </p>
<p>Let’s not get too crazy about this. I don’t HATE general eds; I am not going to start a worldwide campaign to abolish them or anything like that. All I wanted to see was what people’s opinions of them are and how college would be different if they (hypothetically speaking) did not exist in the form they do now. </p>
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<p>The advanced level course requirement in the HASS concentration is not formally stated in the HASS requirement, but if you look at each HASS department’s concentration information, it looks like concentrations are only approved if they include an advanced level course (and some departments may have too few introductory level courses anyway).</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s too rational to say that college without general education is just a trade school. I can see your point, but the majority of the world does not have the same university general education system that the US has. </p>
<p>Personally, I’ve loved my gened courses. I’m a physics major/math minor, but I also love sociology/anthropology, I love art and music, and the humanities in general. I didn’t ‘love’ my English composition or my communications courses in quite the same way, but I can see the value in them regardless, and I did take a lot of very valuable information home with me from them. I’ve only got a few more gened courses left, and I’m kind of disappointed about that. There are so many other ones that I’d love to take. I’m also excited that I’m going to get to start focusing solely on my major courses, but it’s always been nice to have that humanities or social science course to go unwind in after having math and hard science all day long. </p>
<p>A lot of American students don’t love their GenEd courses. But where does that line get drawn? If someone is in a major that doesn’t really require any mathematics, do we drop the requirements for a college level math? There are PLENTY of students that would absolutely love that. I work in the tutoring center at my school, and I’ve encountered a ton of them. I personally find it hard to imagine a college education without gened courses. I know I definitely wouldn’t like it as much though. I have too many interests to restrict myself to only one or two subjects. </p>
<p>Mr. Magaziner and Mr. Maxwell published a nice little paper in the late 60s that did a good job of expressing why general education requirements were not necessary (among other curricular reforms): <a href=“http://library.brown.edu/libweb/papers/BrownCurriculum.pdf”>http://library.brown.edu/libweb/papers/BrownCurriculum.pdf</a></p>
<p>-Trade School Alumnus</p>
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<p>I looked at a couple and found concentrations that don’t require advanced courses, at least, per what the website says. It’s possible that it may be a hidden rule that they they’ll reject it if it doesn’t include an advanced course, but there certainly seem to be concentrations where you don’t have to.</p>
<p>Which concentrations?</p>
<p>If the failure is in high school, lets just call a spade a spade. Have kids who need them, do them, don’t charge me for underwater basket weaving when my kid has an IB diploma and plenty of APs and wants to be an engineer. </p>
<p>@Alfonsia: There are a good number of schools who will give credit for those AP/IB’s and won’t make you pay for courses that aren’t required to become an engineer (though that’s usually at least or close to 3 years worth at a bare minimum anyway). </p>
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<p>You’d have a point if you forgot to account for the fact the REASON why they don’t have GEs in university is because college-level GE courses given in college-prep high schools which tend to be much more academically rigorous than most average US high schools even if they offered AP/IB courses. </p>
<p>Generally speaking, that is the way it is in Europe - it is like you are starting out in sophomore or junior year with your major chosen. As a result, students are more focused and can graduate with a higher level of specialized knowledge. They are not at all about liberal arts education or exploration, but assume students have chosen what they want to do and it is very difficult to change courses. The system can be inflexible, so you have to be careful to choose the correct major.</p>
<p>In our experience, because kids in Europe know this, they adjust accordingly and get down to business earlier, in high school. Interestingly, the level of high school education is also relatively higher than the US, yet students don’t have to work harder or longer than Americans - we have seen friends’ children who get stuck with makework in the US, often working late into the night when our kids worked about 3 hours per night in Europe and got excellent general educations nonetheless.</p>
<p>Another result of European specialization is that they can complete their degrees in 3 years, hugely lessening costs. Our daughter is at Cambridge U now, and it will cost us 1/4 what a BA would in the US, but that is another discussion. </p>
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<p>There’s also the factor that students in Europe and other countries who enter college-prep high schools are much stronger on average as less academically capable students are usually placed in various vocational/apprenticeship tracks so they wouldn’t be part of the college-prep group. </p>
<p>Very unlike the US where the “everyone goes to college” mentality means most US high schools have students with a much wider spectrum of academic abilities compared with college-prep HS in Europe and other countries. </p>
<p>In the US, students who can barely write a coherent paragraph/sentence or struggle even with 9th grade level algebra are permitted to attend college whereas such students in many foreign countries would be tracked off the college-prep track in middle school/early high school. </p>
<p>@alcibiade: Cambridge is a public university to English/EU residents.</p>
<p>Schools like UMich/Cal/UVa/UCLA/UNC/UT-Austin/UW-Madison also cost a fraction of full-pay at a private to their in-state residents (and UW-Madison is in-state to MN residents as well).</p>
<p>One thing I like about the US system is that it gives kids a chance to try out fields that aren’t generally taught in high school - linguistics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, obscure languages, applied vs theoretical math etc… I took a computer programming class for the first time in college and knew right away that while I was competent enough, it was not for me! </p>
<p>When I was in college we could either take one year of courses that were designed as gen ed courses or two years of regular courses. For science/math I took a year of calculus, a year of regular pre-med lab physics, and a semester of computer programming,(only the comp sci course was a gen ed course) for social science, I took a semester of Chinese history, a semester long sociology course and a year of western political theory - all gen ed courses. My major was in the humanities. I liked the flexiblity. Since then then college as completely revised the requirements a couple of times with many more areas of study.</p>
<p>Early in the thread, ucbalumnus cited Brown, Amherst, and Evergreen State as places where students took classes only in their field of study. While it’s certainly true that Brown and Amherst have no General Education requirements, and it is technically possible at those colleges for a student only to take courses relevant to his or her major, that doesn’t characterize education there accurately at all. (I don’t know about Evergreen State, other than it seems to be sort of a hotbed for hipsters. Maybe no one has to take square, boring classes there?)</p>
<p>Demographically and culturally, the students at Brown and Amherst are indistinguishable from, say, the students at Harvard and Williams, where there are plenty of Gen Ed requirements, and as far as I know the actual curriculums that Brown and Amherst students take involve a lot of breadth. Their advising systems encourage that. Major completion requirements at those colleges generally run to only 1/3 - 1/2 of the classes needed to graduate – exactly like the major requirements at colleges with strong core curriculum programs – so there is plenty of room in one’s schedule to take unrelated courses. At a school like Amherst, in many departments, one could quickly exhust all of the available course offerings if one attempted to take only courses related to one’s major.</p>
<p>Anyway, the point is that, notwithstanding their lack of Gen Ed requirements, Brown and Amherst do not in the least resemble a European-style university.</p>
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<p>Isn’t it also the case that those school systems require the student to choose (or track the student in) a specific educational and career path much earlier? I.e. by early high school, the student is already set on a path (e.g. university path versus trade school path), and changing would mean significant delay and “catch up” work. That allows for designing the high school education to be optimal for each group of students, at a cost of requiring earlier choosing and tracking that some may consider unreasonable to require at such an early age.</p>
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<p>“Where students are not required to take general education requirements” is a more correct sentence. I.e. it is possible at such schools to take only courses in one’s major, although it is likely that most students take some out-of-major courses anyway.</p>
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<p>However, the selection of out-of-major courses may differ for students at a school with no general education requirements compared to a school with general education requirements. For example, there probably are not too many students at those schools who take an out-of-major course selection that approximates the general education requirements at MIT.</p>
<p>My observations over my adult life as a college advisor and parent, thinking about what is in a degree and what should be in a degree, is that fields such as education, engineering and business, which can be entered with just a BA, or with a graduate degree, are better approached with the broader background and skill set of the grad degree.
Certainly it serves the student better in the long term if not the short.
So I do feel that liberal arts courses are important even ( especially) for someone looking for a technical degree.</p>
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<p>mathmom beat me to it: one of the biggest advantages of general education requirements is to expose students to subjects that are not English, science, history, math, and French or Spanish or Latin. </p>
<p>Also, in the age of “a college degree is like a high school degree,” it’s good to force students to learn as much as possible: it makes the college degree more valuable. Students generally take at least thirty-two courses, and a major usually requires twelve courses. So why not have the kids spend some of those twenty courses learning history, writing, art, and science? </p>
<p>Lazily constructed gen-ed requirements are a big reason why I’m trying to transfer into a school that doesn’t have them. (Of course, I will say this has a lot to do with the quality of the college; gen-ed at an elite school may be better than the gen-ed I’m familiar with.) It is better to make a course of studies that is interdisciplinary and centered around something relevant. That is, rather than making a Politics major take some non-challenging math class (precalculus, college algebra), make it a major requirement for her/him to take something relevant to logic/critical thinking. </p>
<p>I can easily see why there is such a high dropout rate at my university; most of the kids are struggling to pay for a degree that requires them to take two years of (mostly) poorly taught irrelevant classes. Again, this criticism probably only applies to schools like mine (large, public, working-class).</p>
<p>A problem with our education system is that it’s trying to make scholars of everyone but heck, not everyone is going to be a scholar. The way everything is structured just pushes away students. I mean, if you’re the upper-middle-class parent of a talented kid, then I understand why you would think gen-ed is good; your child is smart, privileged and doesn’t have to worry much about the cost of his or her time/money. But I’ve personally witnessed several kids over my first semester completely disengage from college due to all the things I’ve mentioned. </p>
<p>The gist of my opinion is that while it’s nice to think that a few liberal arts classes are going to make an engineer see the world differently, they’re probably not. They’re just going to make this engineering student curse the fact that they have to sit through it in the first place. The very people that WANT to see the world “broadly” are going to search for this perspective on their own; it just can’t be enforced. </p>