They propose the creation of a “School of General Education”. When I attended college, this is what we had. Regardless of degree, we had a two year “basic core education” requirement. It was what this group proposes become standard in college programs today:
Under the act, the core curriculum would consist of a set of courses on western and world civilizations, economics, science, and U.S. history, government and literature — and universities may not add to it.
The proponents argue that education should deliver a core background for an educated electorate and that college prep should help to establish a common understanding of U.S. history, the reason for the Declaration of Independence, and the purpose of the U.S. Constitution, among other topics.
I had a two-year long humanities core subject program, taught by 4 professors. One was a historian, one a philosopher, one an art history professor, and one a literature professor. We had the same cohort of students through the entire program.
Our university also had core requirements in math and science. In my case, those were fulfilled by my college major, which was engineering the first 2 years, then switched to computer science (in the days when computer science was similar to today’s computer engineering programs).
An oddity of that program (and many today) is that students enter college excited to study their major focus – but spend the first two years taking many courses unrelated to their major. During my first two years, I took just 2 classes related to my major. As I entered my junior year, I then took only major-related course work. Another issue is that under the current system of “core requirements”, if a student transfers from one college to another, with a different set of core requirements, their course credits often do not transfer – unless they completely fulfilled all core requirements at their first college.
The group making these proposals today wants to mandate that colleges adopt this standard, and as they noted in the story, remove existing “cafeteria style” programs where students take a host of unrelated and often easy courses that do not necessarily create a common skillset or way of approaching problems.
Indeed, the grade distributions is kind of wacky (I do not have the original source for this chart, sorry):
Colleges see this as interference with “academic freedom”. In some ways, the prevalence of near random “core requirements” has harmed students (as noted above, random requirements restrict student’s opportunity to transfer to different colleges). It’s unclear to me, in this case, that academic freedom is serving the needs of the students – and it is the students should be the priority, and secondarily, in the case of public colleges, the taxpayers who may be providing funding for much of the college.
I once read that, in spite of a lack of standards, just 25 courses account for 55% of all classes taken during the first 2 years at colleges. That was from over 15 years ago and I do not know if that is still true today. College teaching efficiency could be improved through use of standardized curriculums for these broad, common courses. That was the thrust of the old article in which I read about the 25 courses accounting for 55% of first two year classes.
