If what you want from college is narrowly-focused training for a specific type of job, for some jobs that’s available without going to college for a degree. For some other jobs, the kind of well-rounded education you get from “outside the major” classes are a necessary, or at least desirable, part of the preparation for that job.
Right; and I think nowadays many colleges have their “gen ed” degree requirements spelled out in much that way: A list of skills the student is expected to have, followed by lists of classes they could take to develop those skills.
Are you talking about reducing the overall number of credit hours required for a degree?
Any student who graduates from a HS in Quebec and wants to go to a university in Quebec must first go to what is essentially a community college. A university degree then takes 3 years and if you want to stick to your major–and it offers 90 credits in that department-- you can.
When I went to college I was planning to major in chemistry. But I discovered that I was not really cut out for laboratory work and I discovered how much I liked abstract algebra. That became my life.
That’s definitely a good thing. Too many community college students end up shotgunning classes that they think will meet their general education requirements at a 4 year school and end up having to take more general education at the 4 year because they haven’t met a diversity requirement or a substantial writing requirement.
To answer the OP, I think it is a good thing that students at American universities get a well rounded education and don’t just focus on one thing. Taking an art history class and enjoying it might mean they look for a career applying that economics degree in the arts. At the very least, they’re a bit more well rounded.
We even had to take PE courses as late as the mid-90s. In part for “sound mind in a sound body” reasons, and partially to give all the kinesiology grad students TA positions.
We also had a bunch of humanities electives and social science electives as well as core curriculum English, history and political science courses. And an 18 hour minor.
Of course PE, I thought that went without saying. We had to pass a swimming test, or take and pass a swimming class (in the nude, for those folks for whom that is important). Spring semester I took fencing. I think we had semesters rather than quarters but this is a 50+ year old memory so I’m not sure.
If I had stuck to classes I needed to graduate, I’d be a lab technician now… and miserable.
And I’d never have gotten to help a Philosophy prof from England finish his book (a light-hearted approach to Logic), or take ‘A History of Furniture and Interior Design’, or meet with six other history buffs in the professor’s home (his wife would serve us cider and scones in front of their huge fireplace).
I’m SO glad I got to try so many different things (also did some cartography, painting, sculpture, music theory, and journalism… it was a small liberal arts college with lots of breadth).
So, I got to have a number of completely different careers (Advertising, Youth Minister, Illustrator, Road Crew, Writer, Designer, Teacher). I’d be bored to death just doing one job.
I went to school for journalism and it was a very well-rounded degree. I took astronomy, US history, macroeconomics, anthropology, Ohio history, intro to African studies, even weight training and billiards. I took some cool English language classes too, and more.
For journalism that kind of stuff is important. It helps breed curiosity and gives you a much more well-rounded background than your typical public high school student would have. Those classes could have sparked my interest in writing for any type of publication. If I just went to school to learn how to write articles, my education would have been sorely lacking.
I’m sure the same goes for, say, business majors, education majors, all of the communications majors, science majors, probably even social work and pre-med majors.
Maybe some 4-year degrees don’t need to be well-rounded in order to get yourself a career after you graduate. Like perhaps computer science? But there’s a ton of degrees where “non-major” classes are doing as much to prepare you for your career as the “major” classes.
It seems to me we have a fairly well-agreed upon consensus in this thread, in favor of general education and critical thinking.
That is probably because the Straight Dope community is a self-selected, largely well-educated population with an obvious bias in favor of all that.
But contrast that with the widespread epidemic of anti-intellectualism that is spreading in society at large. We may not have a general societal consensus here. That is scary.
I wonder. ISTM that a lot of the people who are very distrustful of (what they perceive as) modern academia are nonetheless at least nominally quite favorable toward the principle of general education. All those homeschooling parents teaching Latin, for example.
There certainly are a lot of anti-intellectuals railing against “academics” and “educational elites” and “liberal scientists” and so on, but in many cases that seems to coexist with reverence for a very wide range of traditional fields of knowledge and a “well-rounded” education. What the anti-intellectuals mostly seem to object to is the whole phenomenon of modernity and modern institutions, not the principle of general education per se.