Major Based Classes Only? (College)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Even though gen ed and liberal art classes (outside of our majors) are required to graduate, do you think that colleges should offer a choice for students to only complete classes within their major?

Now, I understand that we all need to complete certain classes outside of our major in order to graduate, but by giving students a choice, then they can graduate early, along with not accumulating any extra student loan debt as well.

However, they can still take gen ed/liberal art classes if they want to.

2

Different colleges have different goals in the education of their students. When I was at University of Chicago, the well-rounded student was a very strong goal, which is why I had to take a year of biology (which I hated), and another year of combined chemistry and physics (which I liked) even though I was a philosophy major. (My roommate one year was a physics major and hated having to take liberal arts classes.) Other schools may be more career-focused and have fewer extraneous course requirements. Even where I was, the extraneous courses were mostly in the first two years, and the last two years were mostly major-focused.

I think some exposure to classes outside your major is a good thing on the whole, although schools should try harder to make them more palatable so the students don’t hate them. A bachelor’s degree should, in my opinion, be a certificate that you have received a basic general education at college level, and not only that you are a budding expert in a particular field.

3

Universities and colleges of late have tended to require students to declare their majors earlier and earlier. They do this in the name of “retention,” that is, keeping the students they’ve already got and discouraging shopping and moving around. This is in the name of the university keeping the tuition stream.

That can do real harm to students. By forcing them to major early, the university pushes people to think in a more opportunistic, instrumental way, rather than develop their interests and their thinking more broadly.

That in turn reinforces the problem Erich Fromm described as the difference between intelligence and reason. Simply put, intelligence is a measure of how well one can solve a problem within a box drawn by someone else. Think, “crow using a stick to get a peanut out of a crack.”

Reason is the ability to think broadly, to consider context, to think outside the box, to consider the whole. Intelligence has brought us to environmental destruction and more. Reason might get us out of it. Take some courses outside your major. The world will thank you for it.

4

I went to a college that only had two non engineering degrees, chemistry and economics. They didn’t even offer an English Lit class or anything similar. What they did was have writing intensive classes so labs where you had to write long reports or other classes with lots of research and writing. We had to take 3 humanities classes, I took Engineering Cultures, history of US technology and something I don’t remember where we had to read guns germs and steel as the only text book.

I really like that style of college education if you want breadth go to a library. I have also hired many engineers from my college because they were taught how to think and to work. It is also a public school so it’s relatively inexpensive but there are so many classes required by ABET that I don’t think it’s a cheaper way to go than a liberal arts degree.

5

One problem with that system would be that students don’t always know what their major is going to be, and lots of the ones who think they do know end up being wrong. Many of them would either have to switch majors and start over completely from scratch, or not switch and be stuck studying something that is wrong for them.

Another issue is that most gen ed courses are really about developing a particular intellectual skillset that educated people need to have in some form or other – reading dense and complex texts, making sense of numerical and statistical information, expressing your ideas clearly, developing and testing a hypothesis, recognizing and respecting cultural values and assumptions that differ from your own, being able to respond to opposing points of view, etc. It’s possible that you COULD learn all of these skills by taking courses within a single academic field, but most disciplines are better at instilling some of them than others.

6

Yep. I’m a big fan of the general ed requirement, even though there were a couple of requirements I really, really didn’t want to deal with in college. Speech, for example. Goddamn, do I hate public speaking. Which of course was the whole point of making me do it. I’m all in on the liberal arts ideal of coming out of college with some breadth of education rather than just as a hyper-specialized cog in the machine.

7

I’ve always thought it’s a good idea to open yourself up to new experiences, especially when young and attending college / university the first time.

How will you know what you’re missing if you avoid exposure to it entirely?

8

Count me too in favor of a good general education. To be a competent participant in modern society, one must be at least superficially knowledgeable about a lot of topics, many of which include a good dose of CRITICAL THINKING.

Just look at all the nonsense pervading our public discourse these days – science denial, vax skepticism, flat earthery and all manner of related horsemanure. And look at all the hokum coming from people who don’t know jack shit of history. (There was a legislator just yesterday saying we had more freedom before the Revolution than we do today.)

I took general ed classes in “General Business”, “Intro Accounting”, and the obligatory “American Government” (as well as US History of course), and I think these should be absolutely required subjects if one is to function in today’s American society.

In Hawaii, they don’t require American History, but instead require World History. I took one semester of that, and found it enlightening.

9

Great post. Thank you.

10

I think I benefited a lot from my school’s gen ed requirements while getting my civil engineering degree. I feel I learned a lot of things that were never even touched on in my engineering classes. Within the flexibility offered by gen ed requirements I was also able to take some courses in subjects that interested me, like American literature.

A lot of my classmates would’ve loved to skip all of that and just do their engineering coursework. I still think there’s value in keeping students somewhat well-rounded.

11

A point about critical thinking that is often missed is that it requires more content than just learning to spot fallacies or check sources. Too often we think of it as “Philosophy 101,” or “How to read a news story,” but you need another place to stand to evaluate ideas, and a broader education is key to that. After all, when Marx talked about “the idiocy of rural life,” he was referring to the isolation of peasants, not their IQ, and education broadens the mind. It’s not the only way, but it is a pretty good way, and surprisingly efficient

12

:slight_smile: Thanks!

13

Engineering, so I had to declare that before I started, but I attended both a university with a common first year, and a university with streaming from the start. I don’t think that mattered: it was just organisational, and reflected power structures, rather than making a difference to the students.

The old conservative university with the common first year didn’t have a humanities stream, (unless you were a very good or very bad student authorized to graduate late).

The young narrowly-focused university did have a compulsory humanities stream. In theory, this probably balanced the early specialization. In practice of course, it reflected the power structures. It funded the humanities as part of the university, and the university wanted to have a humanities stream. And the departments did want to be part of a university, and even did want to have funding at the level of the old conservative university.

Anyway, the humanities stream didn’t have the inertia of the old university, and the departments didn’t have the inertia of the old university, which enabled the young focused university to respond to educational ideas that were only 20-30 years old, instead of 50-100 years old.

Which meant that the humanities stream was completely worthless, run for the benefit of the liberal-arts faculty, self-indulgent, corrupt, content free, un-evaluated, un-certified, un-governed, un-regulated, not part of a body of theory or knowledge, directed at a student body who had already chosen their field of study, contrasted with classes where teaching and learning were both required and measurable.

Which did expose the engineering students to bad management and teach the skill of telling people in power what they wanted to hear, but educated them to hate and hold in contempt the humanities.

14

I once knew a guy who said, “I don’t want to be well-rounded; I want to be a dodecahedron.”

Some universities consider an AA degree from a community college to satisfy gen-ed requirements by default.

15

I agree with all of the above. College has increasingly become technical training for a particular field, in part because that’s what students and parents have come to expect, for the large sums of money that they’re paying for that education – they want to see the return on their investment that comes with a good-paying job in the chosen field.

Our population has increasingly lost its ability to think critically, to be intellectually curious, and to have a basic understanding of how the world works; narrowing the scope of what is in a college education will do little to combat those trends.

16

… and to be interesting people!

Believe me, there is nothing worse than sitting at a bar or coffee place with engineers or accountants who only know their own field. Borrrring…

On the other hand, I recently was at a table (a bar’s patio) with a friend and his cool(er) friends. They were VERY well-rounded… talking about books that’d made a difference in their lives, and the bands they’d been in, and the junker cars they’re fixing up, oh and when I had to leave they were recommending wilderness trails they’d hiked, and which you can take off-road bikes on.

17

I’m a big fan of requiring more than just courses related to the major. Perhaps part of my enthusiasm for it is that many employers hire people with a degree even if the major has nothing to do with the job. True example:

  • individual got undergraduate degree in criminal justice and master’s degree in forensic psychology.
  • hired on to teach English to non-native speakers
  • Writes “correct English” as follows: fiancé and I’s dog is a rescue animal.

Also, as kneobi_65 mentioned, critical thinking is a lost art (or, as I like to put it, an abandoned one) now. Getting to someone while they are still in the learning mind-set is the best way, IMHO, to teach them how to think critically, how to find and evaluate sources, and to understand what rhetorical shenanigans are being applied to sway people.

Another plus in requiring the non-major courses is that it exposes the student to a wider world, helps them to understand essential concepts such as the scientific method, gives them more information about current events, history, civic matters (social studies/government/etc.) than is provided in high school, and a smattering of other things.

Yes, well-rounded is an incredible plus when it comes to education.

18

In California, the universities and community colleges have some kind of statewide agreement that certain gen-ed courses will be taught at all community colleges, and if students take certain well-documented selections from those, then that will automatically be accepted at ALL participating universities as fulfilling their entire lower-division gen-ed requirements.

19

That’s a good idea, and eliminates any doubt as to whether a certain class is transferable.

When my brother started college, after taking a few gap years, he told everyone that at least at first, he was going to major in required classes.

20

For what it’s worth, in British universities it used to be the case (and I think still is) that most undergrads take classes only in one subject. The usual time taken is 3 years. And the Honours classification for British degrees is not like a U.S. GPA, but may depend entirely on exam results in the final year.