I don’t agree. The in-major coursework for most degrees is far more complicated and thorough then a trade school or a certificate. I’m looking at UCLA’s engineering certificates and none of them are comparable to a standard EE major.
It would be interesting, though, if there were schools where you could do almost all in-major stuff and only do the absolute essentials with respect to general education. E.g. maybe Freshman Composition is in because you have to be able to write an essay, but arguably you don’t need US History, Psychology, or Introduction to African Art to do EE stuff. You could get some sort of “Concentration” certificate that you could later upgrade to a full, traditional “degree” by completing general education requirements.
E.g. someone with “triggering” issues could get an EE Concentration certificate, having taken all the tough classes that would have been involved in a full degree, get a job as an EE (possibly for a little less pay than a full degree holder), build up some cash, get some treatment for their “issues”, then go “back to school” to wrap up general education requirements and get that BS or whatever degree you were going for.
Isn’t that essentially an Associate’s Degree?
Pretty much, but you can’t get them in all subjects.
I thought that a lot of colleges have some general ed requirement for associate’s degrees, but I’ll have to search around to verify. Not sure if I have time for it tonight.
So are we now just at the point of arguing against general education requirements? Wonderful. Because what we need are more people with a basic lack of critical thinking skills.
As the old saying goes, Biology can tell you ‘how’ to clone a T-Rex, but Humanities will tell you ‘why’ that might not such a good idea.
It may just be a feature of state universities, but An Associate’s is roughly half a Bachelor’s degree, usually the highest degree offered at a junior/ community college, and allows transfer to most Bachelor’s programs with junior status (some specific program requirements may still apply depending on major). It does cover the gen ed requirements, usually something like 10-11 classes spread across English, History, Math, Science, Art, and the balance being designed for smooth transfer into a Bachelor’s program, or, in some cases, straight into the workforce.
A Technical Certificate, basically the AA without the gen ed stuff in it, can be done first and then ‘nested’ into the other degree in the way suggested earlier in the thread.
Well, I didn’t argue against it. What I did point out was that those types of requirements mean that you are going to have people in classes dealing with topics that they weren’t expecting to deal with and have no interest in dealing with. At which point, maybe it’s not such a bad idea to give a better heads-up to those people. What form that heads-up takes, I don’t know, but trigger warnings or content notes or similar seem fairly reasonable to me.
That actually sort of circles back to what I said before about students not knowing what’s best for them. Remember asking your mom why you have to learn math or trying to force your teacher into telling you exactly when you would need some specific piece of knowledge. It’s not about cloning a t-rex or learning how to solve 2x-7=3 or knowing how to ask for the bathroom in Spanish, it’s about learning to see things from another person’s point of view or bettering your problem solving skills or becoming a bit more well rounded. That’s all part of the college experience, so is being challenged, college is supposed to be hard.
To be fair, I have a hard time arguing against a ‘trigger warning’ in a 101 or other required class, but once you get to electives or classes required for your declared major, I think it’s fair to shift some of the responsibility to the student. Consider it a life lesson. You’re not going to get trigger warnings in real life. Maybe this safe, warm, protected environment would be a good place to start learning to deal with some of the stuff that may be unavoidable later in life.
So, I kind of wanted to respond to this. I personally would expect that a sex scene would be part of this class. And I find movies that de-sexualize homosexuals (like “The Bird Cage”) to be a bit annoying. But…
Getting back to BigT’s point, we live in a society where warnings are given about sexual content all the time. And we live in a society where sexual content is routinely edited out on television, depending on the channel you watch or the time of day you watch or where you’re watching. I mean, you’re probably not going to see a sex scene on an airplane movie (although maybe it happens, I don’t know).
So, given that people are growing up and living in this society, I don’t think it’s really that bizarre that people took a class and didn’t realize they were going to see a sex scene. If people are used to getting warnings about sex scenes in broader society, and having society tiptoe around sexual issues, then I think the university needs to take that into account. I don’t think that your friend needs to change the curriculum, but your friend does need to acknowledge the wider society and plan accordingly.
So, I tried to edit out the reference to BigT but I was too late. I don’t think this is exactly the view he/she holds, so please eliminate that reference.
And… one more addition. I didn’t mean to imply that universities have to tiptoe around gay sex scenes and not straight ones. Just that sex scenes generally are tiptoed around (although I do agree that because of discriminatory attitudes, it’s probably more likely that a gay sex scene would cause a bigger ruckus than a straight sex scene).
The community college I got my AAS from did have such a requirement. Thus, stuff like Anthropology on a Computer Information Systems major’s transcript.
In Florida, the requirements for an AA are almost identical to those for the gen ed portion of a baccalaureate program at the state universities.
People did. If you want, I can find you copies of scripts of King Lear from the 1700s where Cordelia et al. are alive at the end. His downer endings at the time were seen as box office poison.
DAMMIT! Spoiler alert! you have totally ruined King Lear for me now! Thanks a lot!
[/kidding]
It was, in fact, the efforts of Thomas Bowdler to make a “family-friendly” Shakespeare that gave us the word “bowdlerize.”
Virginia too, or at least it used to be that way. Some state universities will exempt bachelor’s degree candidates from all, or nearly all, general education requirements if they have an associate’s degree from a Virginia community college (or possibly from any community college). Northern Virginia Community College has, or once had, a “General Studies” associate’s degree that was more or less equivalent to the general education requirements for a bachelor’s degree and that included no major area classes. I.e. you studied a little bit about a lot, but didn’t go deep into anything - which is more or less what general education requirements are.
All this is done to protect the kiddies. And the easily offended. At one point sf magazines would put in trigger warnings before a story with sex or dirty words. (I’m so far behind I’m not sure they still do.) The New Yorker, on the other hand, does not. I’d hope that a college student would be more like a New Yorker reader than a ten-year-old flipping channels.
Damn. Forgot all about Mr. Bowdler.