<p>What I have not seen mentioned in this thread is the “early college program.” In our area, the local school system has partnered with the local CC and university and created two “schools” and the curriculum taught by HS and college. At the end of the “12th” grade, the student has met all the requirements for HS, and either has an AA degree or a college transcript that covers most of the GenEd stuff. From there a 4 year degree can be finished in 2-3 years. The downside is that this program is co-located with the college, and essentially strips the student from a lot of the high school experience - sports/music/etc. If this were done as a school within a school, my guys would have jumped all over it.</p>
<p>" The downside is that this program is co-located with the college, and essentially strips the student from a lot of the high school experience - sports/music/etc"
-D’s school also had this program in connection with one of the top UGs in our state. Nope, it doe not strip student from any activities, D. was full of them, in fact her sport was taking about 3 hrs /day and many weekends, she was also palying piano (result is Music Minor at college) and was taking private art lessons, was Editor of school newspaper and working in summers for Med. Research lab and volunteering at the hospitals, nothing was stpripped from her at all. She did not need to take some classes in UG, but her program prohibited her from graduating earlier any way, that is why (and other reasons) she had 2 minors and was again engaged a lot while in UG, including working, again, Med. Research lab, volunteering and the most time consuming of them all - Sorority.</p>
<p>For those who find it silly to teach basic life skills at the college level I will relay the following story.</p>
<p>The FA counselor from our local West Coast Ivy spoke at D’s HS. She encourage parents to teach some basic skills before they launched their snowflakes into college. She gave two examples of those lacking the basic skills (remember, this place has a 6% or some such nonsense acceptance rate and is consider one of THE places to be)</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Student comes into the FA office and hands the person behind the counter her W2. Wants to CASH it…it won’t fit into the ATM slot and student didn’t have time to stand in line at the bank.</p></li>
<li><p>Student comes into the FA office with the paycheck stub from an on campus job. Student MADE $200 thru and on campus job but the University only gave them $165. Student demanded the $35 the University had stolen from them. Um…ever heard of deductions…um nope.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Didn’t any of you ever have to figure out what a bidet was for and how you used it for the first time? Smart people are allowed to be stupid on occasion . . . and, no, colleges don’t have to teach bidets to their students.</p>
<p>Life isn’t one-size-fits-all, and no system is perfect. I have a friend who is a research physician in Spain. He has never wanted to be anything other than a medical researcher, at least not since I first met him when we were teenagers more than 40 years ago. But he had a very broad education that included lots of literature, history, and art. His daughter is an MD now, too, and in the current Spanish education system had nothing but STEM classes starting in high school. He thinks it’s a crappy system.</p>
<p>My daughter chose a college with a strong core curriculum because she liked the idea of a strong core curriculum. Then, when she got there, she wasn’t so pleased with what it was like in practice, and she envied her friends at Brown who could limit themselves to what they wanted to study. By the time she graduated, however, and now that she has been out in the world for half a decade even more so, she appreciated having been required to learn things that didn’t come easiest to her. She regularly uses and expands skills and ideas she learned in courses she would not have chosen to take without requirements.</p>
Schools are better than ever. My kids graduated with 3X the skill and knowledge that my wife and I did, three decades ago. It’s really quite impressive. It’s there for the taking, but a desire for education must begin at home.</p>
<p>It would be better if gen ed classes were not required. Frankly, students just take the gen ed classes because they are required and have no intention of remembering the material or pursuing it in further depth after the class. It’s a waste. If they could take a class of interest instead for those credits, they might actually learn something they care about enough to maintain the knowledge of and pursue further. Not requiring gen ed doesn’t mean an undeclared student can’t take a variety of courses, or that a declared student can’t take electives outside their field. The important thing is that they will have taken the course because they WANTED to not because they had to - and if that’s the case then they’re going to put a lot more into it and it’s actually going to have more lasting impact for them than a checkmark on a gen ed checklist.</p>
<p>Considering how most colleges’ GE curricula are structured and the wide variety of courses/flexibility in being able to fulfill them, I am a bit perplexed at the insistence that GE requirements are onerous and most won’t learn anything from them. </p>
<p>That hasn’t been my experience or those of most college classmates/colleagues I’ve worked with beyond a tiny minority of outspoken anti-intellectual types who would have skipped out of all schooling if government K-10 minimum education mandates, parents, and job requirements didn’t force them to do otherwise. </p>
<p>It’s even more ironic considering how weak US K-12 education is on average in teaching basic skills and knowledge to broaden one’s intellectual horizons to the point GE ended up being part of the first two years of most US academic college curricula whereas in Europe and other parts of the world, GE was amply taken care of in middle/high school. </p>
<p>Well…at least those who were considered qualified to continue onto the college prep track by teachers/admins or school examinations. </p>
I am pretty certain the government does not decide what GE courses are required. </p>
<p>
No, if we leave it to many 18 year olds, they would not take most of those GE courses, and they would regret it years later. Given a choice most people would do what is easy and like to do. </p>
<p>My sister gave my niece a choice whether to continue dance and piano when my niece was 9 or 10, whereas I encouraged strongly for D2 to continue when she wanted to quit sometimes. Years later my niece said she wished her mother had made her to continue those ECs. </p>
<p>I was a math major, given a choice I would not have taken the required philosophy & religion course in college. I struggled in that class, but looking back it was one of my favorite classes. I grew up without any religion at home. The course introduced a lot of concepts I was not aware of before. To me, that’s what college is all about. It is a time to explore and to stretch one’s comfort zone.</p>
<p>This. I took Modern Art History because I needed a fine arts course to fulfill a fen ed. I didn’t really like the class while I was in it, but I now tell my advisees it was the most useful course I took in college. I see the art and references to the movement and artists all the time, and I feel like knowing/recognizing/understanding art has been good for me. </p>
<p>I would have avoided computers like the plague, too, but I HAD to take a course, so I took one and learned this magnificent new program called SpeedScript on a Commodore 64 (with external floppy drive) that allowed me to type, correct, and print, and I never needed white out again! Holy Cow! I was sold, but I wouldn’t have done it if nobody made me. </p>
<p>Would college be better without gen eds? It’d be faster. It might be cheaper. Does faster and cheaper make college better? Average student debt is under 30k at graduation. Is college debt crippling most graduates? </p>
<p>Would college be better without gen eds? A lot of discussion of engineering programs. I’m not sure why engineering is the holy grail of bachelor’s degrees. (I spend my summers working with engineering documents for a municipality. Believe me, if there’s a group that needs more time in communicative competencies, it might be engineers. Then again, I might not have a summer job if they wrote better.) </p>
<p>For some reason, cc is a place that loves college but gives the impression that educators are idiots. Let’s step back and give them some credit. There’s a reason colleges say students need exposure to a breadth of information to earn a bachelor’s. There’s a reason it’s called an education and not just job training. Even in fields where there’s an AA and a BA version of the job, there’s an advantage to holding the degree that requires more “education.”</p>
<p>“that’s great. Unfortunately, that’s not how they have been set up for us.”
Yes, it could be different situation. However, my original point was about wrong academic program in k -12 the program that does not prepare for college at all, even the top of the top form the most rigorous private HS admit that they needed to adjust at college and if they do not, they get derailed. The purpose of k -12 (and it does not need to be 13 years, it could be only 10 ) is to prepare every single student for college, so that every single one has an opportunity and it is possible and done abroad, so there is no miracles of any sort, magic wands and genius are not part of it, just the rignt academic program at the right level with the right teachers. Even fancy expansive books are not required, even computers and other technology is just a nice bonus but not the must, no great stadiums, not gorgeous buildings, not even small classes are a must.</p>
<p>How true is that? With the exception of Finland and maybe a few others, I was under the impression that most foreign education systems basically tracked many kids away from higher-education (other than vocational training) at a fairly early age (like 12-13, if not earlier). Where is that not true?</p>
<p>Private schools determine their general education requirements themselves, with no government input. Even most public schools locally determine their general education requirements; very few (if any) such requirements come from government entities above the level of the school or school system. Indeed, the range of schools’ attitudes toward general education (from none to a core curriculum that is the entire curriculum) indicate that a student has considerable choice here, although such choice, as with all college choices, can be limited by both prior academic credentials and cost limits.</p>
<p>Some states’ public universities are expensive with poor financial aid for their in-state students (e.g. Pennsylvania). For someone from a low to middle income family in such a state, and who does not have the credentials for admission to private schools with good financial aid or for large-enough merit scholarships, one extra or fewer semester of school may be the tipping point of whether s/he will be able to afford to complete a bachelor’s degree.</p>
<p>Of course, as noted in the other thread about three year bachelor’s degrees, trimming a bachelor’s degree program in most liberal arts subjects need not eliminate the typical amount of general education requirements. A bachelor’s degree program in most liberal arts subjects typically has about a third to a half of its credits for the major, a quarter to a third in (non-overlapping-with-major) general education, and the rest in free electives. It is at least theoretically possible to cut most liberal arts bachelor’s degree programs to six semesters’ worth of credits while retaining all subject requirements in the major and general education. But there would be little or no room for completely free electives, and students would have to follow schedule templates very carefully to graduate in six semesters.</p>
<p>I definitely needed the gen ed’s I took! While they weren’t directly related to the career I desired, the classes kept me on my toes and made me think about things other than criminology (my major). I think focusing on one concentration entirely can be a bit draining.</p>
<p>"How true is that? With the exception of Finland and maybe a few others, I was under the impression that most foreign education systems basically tracked many kids away from higher-education "
-Incorrect impression, which not based on any facts at all.</p>
<p>According to Wikipedia 47% of Finnish kids are on a vocational school track. And in much of the third world education is only required through age 12 or 13. Those who go on may have a college prep curriculum, but it’s a small fraction of the total population.</p>