General education courses are a requirement at most four-year universities, where they are also a common topic of complaint for students. I had my fair share of gripes about having to take STEM classes throughout my degree, so it would be hypocritical of me to act like I don’t understand where these complaints come from. However, I urge you to think more critically about the actual benefit of general education requirements.
As I have previously written about, in my article “Censoring gender in higher education impacts …”, liberal arts universities get their name from the Latin “liberales artes”, meaning “education worthy of a free person.” Liberal arts universities and degrees are not meant to just teach a specific skill or trade; they are meant to teach learners to think more deeply and engage with the world from a more critical lens.
Different universities have different general education requirements. SLU structures the University Undergraduate Core in the spirit of Jesuit beliefs by focusing on encouraging students to connect deeply with themselves and their communities and think deeply about the world in which we live. Requirements include classes in typical categories like writing, science and math, but also in less typical ones like philosophy, theology and creative expression.
Some of these requirements are more rigid and require a specific class to fulfill, presenting a shared challenge for all students. Others are more flexible and have a number of courses that could fulfill them, allowing students to explore their academic interests. Regardless of their rigidity, these requirements all work together to create a well-rounded student, regardless of their primary academic discipline.
Being challenged — such as by taking a quantitative reasoning class as an English major or by taking a public speaking class as a computer science student — is how our brains grow. Learning new skills, like how to write a dissoi logoi, is how we develop our abilities to consider long term outcomes and predict unintended impacts of our decisions. These skills are most obviously aligned with the outcome of humanities degrees, but they benefit those in STEM degrees as well. Or, at the very least, they benefit those of us who are impacted by those in STEM fields; I would really like it if the nurses and doctors I get treated by, the engineers whose bridges I drive on and the CEOs of the companies I buy from think deeply about the potential outcomes and impacts of their choices.
However, not everyone is in agreement on the benefits of general education courses. Common arguments against general education requirements generally focus on three main issues: they result in less time spent in the workforce, not enough time spent on specialization and more money spent on education. However, none of these issues are actually rooted in general education requirements. And those claiming that a three-year, British-style degree system would be better are ignoring how broad the impacts of such a change would be.
For starters, earning a four-year degree instead of a two- or three-year degree is not actually that much time removed from the workforce. Even if a student takes five or six years to graduate — which is becoming increasingly common, but not because of general education courses — that is only two to four extra years before entering full-time employment.
And considering how many college students are working while in school, saying that students are completely outside of the workforce is not entirely accurate. This argument also relies on the idea that college graduates are able to start their post-college career immediately after they graduate, which is increasingly not the case.
As for the claim that not enough time is spent specializing in current American degree programs, I honestly find this laughable. My undergraduate majors in English and communication required me to take ten program-specific courses and declare a concentration to focus my classes on.
At SLU, a B.A. in English requires ten classes and there are optional concentrations, while a B.A. in communication requires thirteen classes with a declared concentration. It is possible to specialize at the undergraduate level, if that is something a student desires.
Not every degree is meant to be specialized, though. While jokes about useless degrees may be funny to some, these jokes ignore that not everyone is using their undergraduate degree to go into one specific, conventional field.
Sure, a degree in aerospace engineering has some pretty obvious career choices, especially when compared with a degree in philosophy. But this is a feature of humanities degrees, not a bug. If someone enters college with an interest in completing further degrees or in learning transferable skills that can apply to a range of fields, a broad humanities degree might be the right choice.
If someone, like myself, knows they want a career as a researcher, it makes sense for them to find a degree in the field they love, rather than pursuing a degree with a more streamlined career path. Struggling to find a job after graduation does not reflect a degree’s worth; it reflects American workforce values.
The monetary cost of general education is the complaint that is most clearly not the fault of the requirements. Looking at the United Kingdom, it’s true that their student loans upon graduation are generally higher than those in the United States. However, the average student loan payment in the U.K. is approximately 108 U.S. dollars a month, while the average student loan payment in the U.S. is $503 a month. The American affordability crisis is an entire issue on its own, and blaming general education for it is inaccurate.
Many who argue against general education claim that they do not want the courses removed, just lessened. They often look to the British system, where undergraduate degrees are three years long and have little to no general education requirements. These claims are often built on the idea that American high school is where general education is done. The two countries have extremely different secondary schooling systems, though.
British students begin the early stages of degree specialization as early as 16 years old; students take three to four classes that relate to their future degrees and sit for A-level examinations, which are only somewhat comparable to the American SAT and ACT exams. For American programs to remove general education at the university level, there would have to be more room for true exploration sooner.
I entered my undergraduate degree studying linguistics, Spanish and Portuguese and ended with degrees in communication and English. That early time studying linguistics is how I discovered I wanted to study communication. I realized I loved studying language, but was more interested in the rhetorical use of English than the construction. It also helped that I took a communication class for a general education requirement at the same time I was rethinking my degree path.
Maybe if I had a chance to explore these subjects sooner, I would not have needed to take a general education requirement. But, being from a small, rural town, there was no option for me to truly explore fields outside of the typical English, math, history and science classes. In fact, I ran out of classes to take in high school by my senior year, having maxed out my options in multiple subjects and not being allowed to take the first-year classes of others.
The kind of exploration that removing general education requirements relies on would require a massive overhaul of the U.S. K through 12 education system that we are not honestly capable of.
General education requirements are not inherently perfect, but the complaints about them as a whole ignore a great deal of important context. But, considering K-12 schools were never fully desegregated after Brown v. Board of Education, the Department of Education is being dismantled, Donald Trump’s presidency is increasing censorship in higher education and the affordability crisis is only getting worse, general education requirements are not the most pressing issue in academia.
