Yes, You Need General Education in College

With college being so expensive, I can empathize with the desire to trim as much waste as possible, but I assure you that your general education courses are not waste.

Table of Contents

• The Growing Disdain for General Education Requirements
• What Is General Education?
• What Is So Great About General Education?
• Yet, General Education Requirements Are Not Taken Seriously

The Growing Disdain for General Education Requirements

It’s not too uncommon for me to overhear students complaining about general education requirements. In fact, it’s a topic that comes up all the time even beyond my own personal experience. For instance, it recently made its way onto the r/unpopularopinion subreddit. Here’s the post:

Colleges are insanely inefficient at teaching.

This is coming from someone who completed a traditional 4-year bachelor’s degree with a 3.7 GPA. Overall, I feel the financial value proposition of college is strong because instruction and a degree are necessary to land most professional jobs.

What’s insane to me is the lengths colleges go to waste your time and charge you for unnecessary bullshit while sprinkling in the stuff that is actually relevant to your field. Here are the two main problems I have:

General Ed Requirements: This is the big one. I could have easily completed all the classes within my major/minor in two and a half years if my school didn’t mandate general education and elective requirements. Why the fuck do I have to take and pay for philosophy, gym, sociology and Spanish classes if I want to study economics and computer science? Even technical colleges like MIT require this bullshit.

Professors that Suck at Teaching: While some professors are good an alarming percentage present with the enthusiasm of a cardboard box, explain things poorly, speak with heavy accents that make it almost impossible to decipher what they are saying and go off on long tangents unrelated to the subject matter. I get that most of them are there on tenure to collect a paycheck, but it makes you question what you are even paying for when 90% of the time reading a well-structured textbook gives you a much better idea of how things work than listening to lectures.

In true r/unpopularopinion style, this post got utterly roasted, but I couldn’t help myself from joining in on the fun. After all, I assume this poster would have a lot to say about last week’s article on why college shouldn’t be treated as a jobs program.

What Is General Education?

At colleges and universities, most undergraduate degrees have some form of general education requirement. In STEM, this means that you’re probably required to take a few humanities courses to round out your degree. You might also be asked to take a few writing classes. I had to take three in my undergrad.

I don’t come from the humanities side of things, but I assume they have similar gen ed requirements. Where I work, it looks like the college of arts asks students to take 3-5 credits of “mathematical and quantitative reasoning or data analysis” as well as 4-5 credits in “natural sciences”—among a range of broad humanities requirements. They’re also required to demonstrate proficiency in another language, which may take up to 12 credits.

Ultimately, like I argued in my previous article, college is about creating the next generation of educated and compassionate citizens. Therefore, I think general education requirements are a good thing in certainly more ways than one, which I’ll outline in the next section.

What Is So Great About General Education?

Often, when I am trying to convince students of a position, I don’t try to appeal to their sense of civic duty or their broader empathy. Instead, I target their narcissism. The reason being that it can be really easy to ignore advice when it’s not centered on how it will benefit you directly. Sure, that can be a depressing way of looking at the world, but I just find that it’s much easier to appeal to narcissism.

To illustrate what I mean, I need you to imagine being an introductory programming instructor. Assuming you have some background in software, there are probably a variety of beliefs you hold about what good software looks like. One of those beliefs for me is that you should take pride in your work. Software development is a craft and like any craft, you should take pride in it.

One aspect of pride in software development is code quality. Code quality might include ideas like writing clear documentation, using good variable names, or avoiding magic numbers. These are all ideas that students actively resist because they can feel like obstacles to having a finished product.

Therefore, to convince the students, I don’t try to use pride as the pitch. I cannot instill pride in someone who has no interest in it. Likewise, I don’t try to even use the argument that you might want to make your code easier to work on in a team. After all, this can be a hard sell as students are still doing a lot of work individually, and they just might not care about working in a team.

Instead, I tell students that software development is an ongoing project. You might work on something for days, weeks, or even years. Therefore, you should write code for your future self. Nothing quite feels worse than realizing your past self took shortcuts that you’ll have to deal with now.

Ultimately, I’m going to take the same approach here. I could argue that general education requirements are meant to make you a better contributor to society, but maybe you don’t care about society. I could argue that maybe general education requirements could make you more fun and interesting to be around, but maybe you don’t care about how you’re perceived.

Instead, I’ll say this: general education helps you develop key skills that make you more marketable for jobs. We both know your coding classes aren’t helping you communicate better. We both know your theory classes aren’t helping your connect with others better. The only place you’re developing those skills is in your humanities classes, and you should take them seriously.

Yet, General Education Requirements Are Not Taken Seriously

Even if we all agreed that general education requirements were good, there is still one major barrier in the way. Sure, you might point to college being expensive like the original poster, but I think it’s deeper than that. The reason students don’t take general education requirements seriously is because they’re inherently disconnected from the work they want to do.

If students were forced to consider ethics (for example) in their coding courses directly, they would take them a lot more seriously. Instead, students take their one ethics class and think they’re done worrying about it. It’s this checkbox mindset that prevents the general education courses from having any meaningful impact on students in STEM.

In my mind, most software development courses would be project-based, and students would have to contend with complex “non-technical” issues like ethics, communication, history, leadership, politics, economics, identity, etc. Not only should these ideas be baked into the projects, but students should also be assessed on them directly.

Surely, this would require STEM classrooms to be multidisciplinary, but I think that’s how they should be regardless. Perhaps there should be a philosophy professor in the room with the computer scientist. Maybe we’d have less Peter Thiels, Sam Altmans, and Elon Musks in the world. Though, we’d probably have to tackle our economic system first to make any real headway there.

Anyway, this is a bit of a short article, but I wanted to share my two cents about the importance of general education courses. I definitely recommend reading some of the comments in that thread because there are significantly more reasons outlining the importance of gen eds that I could have possibly listed here. Hell, I read that some people think they’re important because you might discover your new major. How’s that for being open minded?

As always, if you like these articles, there’s plenty more like them below:

• 4 Values We Have to Stop Pushing in Engineering Education
• Gamification Will Not Solve “America’s Education Crisis”
• So You’re Not Sure If Computer Science Is for You

Otherwise, you can take your support a step further by checking out my list of ways to grow the site. If not, no worries! I’ll hopefully see you back here soon.