When the average student on Grounds is asked why they wanted to go to college, the typical response may range from parental influence to furthering one’s academic potential. Underneath this array of responses, however, lies one simple fact — most students would not be here if they did not think that a degree from the University would bolster their future prospects of employment. After all, it would be ludicrous for parents to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars or students to go into debt for an “experience,” expecting no return on investment and no material skill proficiency. When it comes to this return on investment, our University fares better than most. Yet, the laundry list of varying general education classes required to graduate makes a significant portion of the skill-acquiring endeavor that is college completely meaningless.
The annual cost of attending the University for an in-state College of Arts and Sciences student is over $40,000 before financial aid. When parents are asked by the University to break the bank to send their student away to college, they should expect their money to be spent on actually improving their child’s professional skillset. Unfortunately, in a broad category of required classes at the University today, this simply is not the case.
The College of Arts and Sciences requires students to complete courses in seven different categories as one of the many requisites necessary to graduate. These categories range from Science & Society to Historical Perspectives. On the surface, the justification for requiring the Disciplines seems straightforward — the University aims to cultivate students who are well-rounded and thoroughly exposed to various different academic fields. In practice, however, the perplexing difficulties created by the Disciplines far outweigh any pedagogical benefit.
Starting with the obvious, Disciplines are generally an inconvenient diversion from major-specific classes. Most students are — and should be — primarily focused on classes specific to their major, and presumably their future career. Some majors in particular demand countless hours of studying in order to translate to success on exams. Becoming familiar with a complicated topic can be a daunting and tedious task. To force students to divert valuable time from major-specific coursework can conceivably diminish thorough understanding of core subjects.
Students, for their part, tend not to be too keen on letting this happen, to the detriment of the Disciplines. Time is a scarce resource, and this necessarily begets deprioritization. When midterm season approaches and students are under the gun, major-specific classes always become the priority. It is in these classes where students’ performance has the most significant implications for either recruiters or for potential graduate schools.
Consequently, major-specific classes are generally the top agenda item for students facing the inevitable time crunch, while Discipline classes are relegated to the backburner. After all, if a student is going to get a low grade in any class, it should not be a class where recruiters might question that student’s practical competence. Because core classes take priority, attending and studying for Disciplines becomes less of a thought-provoking intellectual excursion and more like an annoyance that must be managed. This does not improve the educational experience — it creates unnecessary hurdles to graduation.
Worse still, this deprioritization creates an incentive for students to select their non-core classes on the basis of ease rather than interest. This results in large swaths of the student population enrolling in introductory astronomy courses or 1000-level math classes to get a requirement over with. There is no point in taking a class just to blow it off. Furthermore, this wholly extinguishes any pedagogical value that the Disciplines, in theory, provide. Far from exposing students to new material, these classes instead serve as an easy A to inflate GPAs and dress up the transcript. Why should an economics student risk taking a challenging science class and tanking their GPA when they can get by in a 1000-level course while exerting zero effort? When students enroll in classes aiming to coast through them with little to no effort, they are learning nothing and instead wasting everyone’s time.
This is undoubtedly a controversial view, but it is the correct one — the University should jettison the Disciplines. Students are here to acquire skills that will prepare them for future employment and ultimately generate a positive return on their initial investment of what could be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Forcing them instead to waste time “learning” a topic they will never apply in practice does a disservice to that insurmountable investment and afflicts what little free time young twenty-somethings have with needless, irrelevant charades.
Joshua Hawkins is a senior associate opinion editor for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at opinion@cavalierdaily.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Cavalier Daily. Columns represent the views of the authors alone.
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