when you go to college what are the specific general eds you have to take. I was thinking about taking some over summer at my local community college. Which ones would you recommend me to take so i will not have to take it later?
Thank you!!!
General ed classes vary a great deal school to school and sometimes you can “test” out of them with AP scores or placement tests. If you have specific colleges in mind it’s worth looking into those ones to see if they share common general ed classes or if they let you test out of subjects. But unless you’re fairly certain where you’ll end up it’s likely a little difficult to find a good course to get out of GERs.
If colleges want a large disciplinary breadth of experience then you can expect some common ones to be language (1 year of study at a college level), a math course, a humanities course, a social science course, a natural science course, an engineering course etc. If you’re interested in religious schools then those may have religious course requirements. If you know your intended major then there are specific major courses common across schools you could look into taking.
Depending on the college, they may not apply courses then outside toward gen ed requirements. You really need to check with the college in question.
Also, you typically can’t do that after you graduated high school as it may jeopardize your freshman status and relevant freshman scholarships.
Some universities have zero requirements and are called “open curriculum”; these tend to be high end universities like Hamilton, Amherst, Brown, although an open enrollment college such as Evergreen State also is open curriculum. Some colleges require clusters, such as College of Idaho, University of Rochester, or Knox.
In most cases, you’ll have General Education requirements : two sequential courses in composition/communication and foreign language (sometimes three, four, or five classes depending on the College and the level of proficiency achieved in high school); often, a communication&writing course applied to your major can be required as well. Plus quantitative skills (applied math, cs, or math for your major).
Then you have distribution requirements, typically 2 each in science, social science, arts/humanities, sometimes philosiphy/ethics/religion. The total typically forms 1/3 of all your college classes with another third for your major and 1/3 electives.