A few institutions have held the line in one or more areas, and some even excel. The University of Georgia, for instance, is the only school in the report to receive an "A" rating for its core curriculum; UGA requires composition, literature, foreign language, mathematics, natural science, and U.S. history or government.
Oh, man, how is that relevant to my life. :-)
ReplyDeleteMy university had no core curriculum, relying instead on what they called "distribution requirements." They did lead most of us to wander outside our majors a bit, but they were often fulfilled by "lite" courses such as watered-down science or math for humanities majors and watered-down literature or sociology for engineers or pre-meds.
Otherwise, the only discipline exerted on our choice of courses was whatever was imposed by our own majors, especially in technical fields where upper-level courses had quite specific pre-requisites, or by our ambitions toward graduate school, which might, for instance, mandate a minimum study of foreign languages.
I ended up with some variety in my studies mostly because I kept switching majors, but it might have been best if I'd been required to study civics, statistics, and a number of other core subjects.
Yeah, it turns out a lot can be relevant to your life if you know it exists. :) What the kids don't realize is how much they will be creating their life. The more raw material you have, the more things you can do with it.
ReplyDeleteWhat bugs me is that they say things like "Only half of college graduates knew who the American general was at Yorktown" when 90% of HIGH SCHOOL graduates ought to know that.
ReplyDeleteSome of these criteria strike me as remedial. For example, a writing course that covers "grammar [and] sentence structure" shouldn't be necessary for college students. (It often is, but it's remedial in nature.) My freshman Humanities course required essays every week or two, but the focus wasn't on grammar or sentence structure; we were assumed to already know how to write a reasonably coherent essay, and graded on our arguments and on mastery of the material.
ReplyDeleteA general course in US History also strikes me as remedial; by college age, students should already have a sense of "the sweep of American history" and shouldn't need to be "exposed" to it. (See above disclaimer about remedial courses often being necessary, but they shouldn't be required.)
A similar report a few years ago dinged colleges for failure to require algebra - and they didn't mean linear and abstract algebra; they meant ninth-grade topics like solution of simultaneous linear equations in one or two variables. I had the same problem there: colleges were being downgraded for not offering remedial math.
That basic English and US History aren't considered remedial may have something to do with the increasing numbers of foreign students at our universities, private universities especially.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point, and one I hadn't thought about.
ReplyDeleteBut that case strikes me as being remedial for the foreign students - "remedial" isn't exactly the right word, but these are students who aren't fully fluent in English and/or who haven't studied American history. So it brings us back to the problem of requiring such elementary coursework for all students, instead of those who need it.