Gen-ed requirements: part of a well-rounded liberal arts education or high school 2.0?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Coming out of high school, I mostly looked at colleges with strong general education programs. I wanted a well rounded education at a higher level, not just courses in my major, and I wanted to surround myself with people who wanted the same thing.

I ended up at Chicago where my experience was definitely not high school 2.0. It was focused and disciplined, and it contributed a lot to the way that college formed who I am. I've got a college friend I see once a week, and we end up mentioning someone we read as part of the core pretty often.

A well implemented program can offer a lot, but a lot of places don't have that.

How would somewhere like Brown have prevented you from getting that same well rounded education?

It may well be possible to piece it together somewhere like Brown. Looking at the course catalog (briefly, obviously) it seems difficult though. As an illustration: like many U of C undergrads, the first thing I read was the Iliad. It looks like there are two classes at Brown this year that mention Homer in their descriptions: one is a topical class on islands, the other is a class on epics that goes through Milton.

On one level, then, I could read the same books. I don't think I'd get the same kind of education, though. The context in which you read a particular text matters, and the contexts are very different. I read the Iliad as part of my humanities core sequence and I read it again in a class on epics like the one from Brown. The humanities sequence I took expressed the goals of the course as "to discover what it means to be an excellent human being and an excellent citizen, and to learn what a just community is." We read Homer alongside Aristotle, Genesis, and Moby Dick, rather than other epics.

The two times I read the Iliad (in college, I still return to it fairly often now) were different courses with different goals, and the way in which we read it the first time has shaped me more than the way in which I read it the second time. The aims of my first year course were general, more aimed at establishing a foundation, than with diving into a specialty. You could offer a course with those kinds of goals at Brown, but the existence of the core is a commitment to making sure that they're in the catalog along with a history of offering them so that an incoming student knows that they're there. You can still take the sequence I took today with mostly the same texts. It has a track record.

There's also the element, for both the humanities sequence I mentioned and for the social science sequences (hum and soc in U of C parlance), that the target audience is first and second year students. There's an element, not of high school 2.0, but rather college 101. A chance to introduce what it means to read closely and think deeply and take those thoughts to a group for discussion. I'm sure a lot of you think you or your kids don't need that, but having watched excellent students from outstanding high schools go through the process (not me, I was from a bog standard public high school in a rural area, but I had classmates from top high schools), I disagree. That experience was invaluable.

There's also what the inclusion of a strong core curriculum means for the culture of the school. Here the best example is not Homer, but Marx. It's basically impossible to pick core sequences that don't include reading Marx, and you'd find a red copy of the Marx-Engels Reader on basically every bookshelf of anyone in my graduating class. That common base of reading leads to a particular kind of experience both in and out of the classroom while you're there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My large public fully admitted that the GE classes were basically high school level and the main point was to make money off tuition. Still, there was wide variety in the quality of the classes. Some were just multiple choice regurgitating of answers with detached instructors, but some had small class sizes with inspiring professors, discussions, and good feedback on writing, etc.

I really hate paying tuition and just jumping through hoops to get a degree. I wanted to learn that stuff and engage with the material. Maybe 65-75 percent tops of the GE classes were actually worthwhile.

In what way did they admit it? Is here a webpage on their site where I can read such an admission?

I read it in an article in the student paper about the administration where they did at least admit that general education should ideally meet certain standards. There was something about how gen ed classes are cheaper to provide, so they made more money. They might have thought, like another commenter here, that many students are unprepared for college, so these classes form a baseline. This was pre internet, so no comments section, my friends and I just shrugged and thought, it figures.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:While GE requirements are rhetorically presented as intellectual exploration and being well-rounded, in practice they're really about dealing with the unevenness of secondary education in the US. Big state flagships get students of quite varying levels of preparation and the functional purpose in reality is to establish some sort of common baseline.

Then why not allow well-prepared students to test out of the required courses?

They often do (AP course credit if they score well enough).

[Anonymous]

This is why i think it's silly to get rid of APs. They help fulfill core requirements. That said, I like the well-rounded education part. It's exercise for their minds and they meet other students not in their major.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My large public fully admitted that the GE classes were basically high school level and the main point was to make money off tuition. Still, there was wide variety in the quality of the classes. Some were just multiple choice regurgitating of answers with detached instructors, but some had small class sizes with inspiring professors, discussions, and good feedback on writing, etc.

I really hate paying tuition and just jumping through hoops to get a degree. I wanted to learn that stuff and engage with the material. Maybe 65-75 percent tops of the GE classes were actually worthwhile.

I also went to a large public and didn't have this experience at all. There were so many interesting Gen Ed courses available, my only regret was that I wasn't able to take more. Which school are you talking about?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Coming out of high school, I mostly looked at colleges with strong general education programs. I wanted a well rounded education at a higher level, not just courses in my major, and I wanted to surround myself with people who wanted the same thing.

I ended up at Chicago where my experience was definitely not high school 2.0. It was focused and disciplined, and it contributed a lot to the way that college formed who I am. I've got a college friend I see once a week, and we end up mentioning someone we read as part of the core pretty often.

A well implemented program can offer a lot, but a lot of places don't have that.

How would somewhere like Brown have prevented you from getting that same well rounded education?

It may well be possible to piece it together somewhere like Brown. Looking at the course catalog (briefly, obviously) it seems difficult though. As an illustration: like many U of C undergrads, the first thing I read was the Iliad. It looks like there are two classes at Brown this year that mention Homer in their descriptions: one is a topical class on islands, the other is a class on epics that goes through Milton.

On one level, then, I could read the same books. I don't think I'd get the same kind of education, though. The context in which you read a particular text matters, and the contexts are very different. I read the Iliad as part of my humanities core sequence and I read it again in a class on epics like the one from Brown. The humanities sequence I took expressed the goals of the course as "to discover what it means to be an excellent human being and an excellent citizen, and to learn what a just community is." We read Homer alongside Aristotle, Genesis, and Moby Dick, rather than other epics.

The two times I read the Iliad (in college, I still return to it fairly often now) were different courses with different goals, and the way in which we read it the first time has shaped me more than the way in which I read it the second time. The aims of my first year course were general, more aimed at establishing a foundation, than with diving into a specialty. You could offer a course with those kinds of goals at Brown, but the existence of the core is a commitment to making sure that they're in the catalog along with a history of offering them so that an incoming student knows that they're there. You can still take the sequence I took today with mostly the same texts. It has a track record.

There's also the element, for both the humanities sequence I mentioned and for the social science sequences (hum and soc in U of C parlance), that the target audience is first and second year students. There's an element, not of high school 2.0, but rather college 101. A chance to introduce what it means to read closely and think deeply and take those thoughts to a group for discussion. I'm sure a lot of you think you or your kids don't need that, but having watched excellent students from outstanding high schools go through the process (not me, I was from a bog standard public high school in a rural area, but I had classmates from top high schools), I disagree. That experience was invaluable.

There's also what the inclusion of a strong core curriculum means for the culture of the school. Here the best example is not Homer, but Marx. It's basically impossible to pick core sequences that don't include reading Marx, and you'd find a red copy of the Marx-Engels Reader on basically every bookshelf of anyone in my graduating class. That common base of reading leads to a particular kind of experience both in and out of the classroom while you're there.

I mean, I read the Iliad and Moby Dick in high school AP English and both Marx and Engels in high school AP Gov. You didn't read these until you reached college? That speaks volumes. Whatever it is you're babbling on and on about isn't exactly making your point.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I took my first upper division elective in the 2nd semester of my freshman year.

How did you meet the prerequisites

I’m not this poster, but I was able to do this as a freshman, as well.

I took AP American & Comparative Gov’t as a class in HS, and I got credit for both those AP tests when I entered.

I also placed into the Foreign Language Lit level with juniors and seniors as a first semester freshman through the placement test the school offered.

I was placed into a special section English class due to my AP test and SAT subject test score. Same with Calculus.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Colleges shouldn't be admitting students who can't write. But if they do that should just be additional time there to catch up, not credit towards the degree.

When my husband was working on his engineering degree at Mason, he had classmates who couldn’t put together a coherent sentence in writing. He asked me to help edit his group project papers, and it was painful trying to make heads or tails of what came to me. My husband, who is dyslexic, was the most coherent of the bunch. Some of these kids were TJ grads. I wish I were lying.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I took my first upper division elective in the 2nd semester of my freshman year.

How did you meet the prerequisites

PP. It was a junior/senior level Social Psychology elective at a flagship. I had taken the intro course in first semester and liked the subject. So I took the 2nd level. I was in the Honors College and already had excellent writing skills. I wasn't intimidated. (I later took a senior seminar in English Literature designed for English majors when I was a junior Economics major.)

My oldest is at a flagship now. I know how to optimize for flagships and with my advice he's lined up some great classes. 2 Freshmen Seminars (regular credit weight) and 3 half-semester mini-courses on highly interesting subjects. He has also really liked some of his gen eds. With 1 AP and 1 class completed in fall semester in his major, he could also have moved on to upper division electives in spring of freshman year if he had wanted to.

Kids have a lot more information now to pick out classes and professors. This is very helpful in customizing one's college education.

[Anonymous]

At Berkeley, you can't use high school courses to meet the 7 course breadth requirement.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I took my first upper division elective in the 2nd semester of my freshman year.

How did you meet the prerequisites

PP. It was a junior/senior level Social Psychology elective at a flagship. I had taken the intro course in first semester and liked the subject. So I took the 2nd level. I was in the Honors College and already had excellent writing skills. I wasn't intimidated. (I later took a senior seminar in English Literature designed for English majors when I was a junior Economics major.)

My oldest is at a flagship now. I know how to optimize for flagships and with my advice he's lined up some great classes. 2 Freshmen Seminars (regular credit weight) and 3 half-semester mini-courses on highly interesting subjects. He has also really liked some of his gen eds. With 1 AP and 1 class completed in fall semester in his major, he could also have moved on to upper division electives in spring of freshman year if he had wanted to.

Kids have a lot more information now to pick out classes and professors. This is very helpful in customizing one's college education.

I took social psych just for fun, pass/fail. I was a politics major/sociology minor, but I also took several communications and psych classes (we weren’t allowed double minors). Honestly, these disciplines interconnect.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm not talking about elite institutions like Yale or Columbia where the breadth requirements are part of a curated humanistic curriculum.

But it seems at say, UMCP or Penn State, a lot of time is spent on these requirements, more than a third of the degree in the arts and sciences. I can see the merit, but in practice it seems to lean to a lot of undisciplined and unfocused learning. In a lot of ways it's like high school again - take your English, take your math, take your foreign language, take your gym etc. In fact the gen-ed requirements are often more extensive than the major to which students are only devoting about 30% of the degree to.

Maybe this is why in a lot of countries the bachelor's degree is 3 years because gen-ed is mainly an American thing.

Waste of time! My DD is ar UCLA after a rigorous private IB program. Can’t wait to move on to major. It’s like high school w pop quizzes in minute facts. She wanted Rah Rah. I had a far superior education at a liberal arts college. What a waste. So wish she went somewhere else. But there’s other things she is experiencing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm not talking about elite institutions like Yale or Columbia where the breadth requirements are part of a curated humanistic curriculum.

But it seems at say, UMCP or Penn State, a lot of time is spent on these requirements, more than a third of the degree in the arts and sciences. I can see the merit, but in practice it seems to lean to a lot of undisciplined and unfocused learning. In a lot of ways it's like high school again - take your English, take your math, take your foreign language, take your gym etc. In fact the gen-ed requirements are often more extensive than the major to which students are only devoting about 30% of the degree to.

Maybe this is why in a lot of countries the bachelor's degree is 3 years because gen-ed is mainly an American thing.

Waste of time! My DD is ar UCLA after a rigorous private IB program. Can’t wait to move on to major. It’s like high school w pop quizzes in minute facts. She wanted Rah Rah. I had a far superior education at a liberal arts college. What a waste. So wish she went somewhere else. But there’s other things she is experiencing.

And moreover, getting into any classes is a crapshoot. You take what you get.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm not talking about elite institutions like Yale or Columbia where the breadth requirements are part of a curated humanistic curriculum.

But it seems at say, UMCP or Penn State, a lot of time is spent on these requirements, more than a third of the degree in the arts and sciences. I can see the merit, but in practice it seems to lean to a lot of undisciplined and unfocused learning. In a lot of ways it's like high school again - take your English, take your math, take your foreign language, take your gym etc. In fact the gen-ed requirements are often more extensive than the major to which students are only devoting about 30% of the degree to.

Maybe this is why in a lot of countries the bachelor's degree is 3 years because gen-ed is mainly an American thing.

Waste of time! My DD is ar UCLA after a rigorous private IB program. Can’t wait to move on to major. It’s like high school w pop quizzes in minute facts. She wanted Rah Rah. I had a far superior education at a liberal arts college. What a waste. So wish she went somewhere else. But there’s other things she is experiencing.

And moreover, getting into any classes is a crapshoot. You take what you get.

The first lesson of flagship is not to accept this.

[Anonymous]

In England the A levels are more or less equivalent to AP courses. They're sort of a bridge between high school and university (which is 3 years).