The liberal arts are under attack. The idea of a collegiate education that is wide-ranging, incorporating coursework in the humanities, sciences, arts, and communication no matter one’s primary course of study, is at the nadir of its popularity. Going beyond the obvious politically motivated attacks of recent years, a broader backlash against the liberal arts has focused on the perceived waste of student time and money. Classes that are allegedly unrelated to one’s career goals lead students to spend an inordinate amount of money staying at school and spending more money lining the pockets of administrators and those fat-cat adjunct English teachers.
On its face, the idea that a liberal arts education is the driver of college costs or is somehow a major waste of time is ludicrous. The bachelor’s degree has been standardized at 120 credits for over a century, and the percentage of a degree that consists of general education courses has actually dropped by 22% over the course of the 20th century. Degrees are becoming more specialized and focused on immediate major-related content. The idea that universities needlessly add spurious coursework to keep students enrolled for longer and further drive up the cost of education is plainly ahistorical. If anything, the RVTURN position would be to pad required courses of study with even more philosophy, writing, foreign language, and fine arts classes.
To get a sense of what standard requirements actually look like in a normal college experience, let’s look at my own collegiate journey. I received a Bachelor of Science in Horticulture from Iowa State University. My gen ed requirements were split into three buckets: university, college, and departmental. Since departmental requirements constituted the “career-centric” component of my education, I will focus on the former two sections.
For the university, four full courses are required. Two English courses that cover critical thinking and written and oral communication, along with an international perspectives and U.S. culture course. There was an additional 1-credit class introducing us to resources offered by the library, which took so little time as to be meaningless in this assessment.
The College of Agriculture, meanwhile, required additional courses in math, statistics, physical sciences, and life sciences for a total of six courses. Plus, one course each in ethics, humanities, and the social sciences on top of university-level social studies requirements.
In summary, roughly 42 credits of general education courses were required of us. If we exempt STEM courses (as I argue that statistics and biology are career-related for a life science major) this drops the general education requirement down to 25 credits, or roughly one-and-a-half semesters of coursework. For an in-state student, this amounts to about $8,550 out of a $45,604 bill for tuition and fees. For an out-of-state student, $23,586 out of $125,796. Nothing to sneeze at, but a small portion of the total bill.
Of course, this is all assuming that the coursework done in these classes is actually unrelated to one’s degree. Critically, at large state institutions, many of these “unrelated” requirements have class options that are tailored to other degrees. Agricultural history or ethics courses that focus on the food system, for example, can cover these requirements for ag college students. I myself took an American food cultures course to fulfill my U.S. culture requirement and a rural sociology course to cover my social sciences requirement. The list of international perspectives courses at Iowa State includes classes covering international wildlife issues, the role of engineering in international development, and international fashion design, each tailored for wildlife management, engineering, and fashion majors. I know smaller schools lack this breadth of options, but for many students there are plenty of ways to fulfill gen ed requirements while staying engaged with career-oriented content.
And even if a course isn’t explicitly designed around one’s academic specialization, students can easily tailor assignments themselves to focus on their chosen areas. In my communications classes, for example, I chose essay and presentation topics aligned with horticulture while completing assignments. This is universally encouraged by professors.
Overall, general education requirements are quite a small portion of total classes taken. Beyond the benefits of building communication skills and the whole expanding the minds of our young people so they can be engaged and well-rounded citizens thing (which are qualities employers actually care about quite a bit; just ask an engineering recruiter), there are ample opportunities for students to integrate their specific degree focuses into these general education requirements. If a student feels strongly that all of their classes should revolve around direct career development,1 there are ample avenues to do so.
It’s also worth restating the fact that, if these requirements were stripped from programs of higher education, students would still need to complete 120 credit hours to receive a bachelor’s degree. So it wouldn’t actually save them any money. You could argue more career-oriented electives would be beneficial for workforce development, and I agree that’s a real tradeoff (I still come out on the side of a liberal arts education, but it’s a more intellectually interesting and honest argument), but there’s no world where this project helps the student debt crisis or gets folks in the workforce faster.
There’s one last benefit to general education requirements that I think actually does save student time and money. The way most students structure their course of study is to front-load gen eds in the first 2-3 semesters, interspersed with a few major-specific classes. This timeline provides students a cushion to switch majors if they wish without having tied up a lot of time in courses that won’t transfer to their new program, minimizing the chance they’ll have to add extra semesters to finish out their degree.
In the end, I’m all for innovating to try and accelerate one’s education and reduce costs. We’ve created a situation where college is the default method for educational and professional advancement. The fact that the collegiate model and liberal arts education were originally designed as a leisurely and social building pursuit for the well-to-do does conflict with its current mission, and we need to be honest about that conflict and work to evolve the model to readily fulfill its current purpose. And we’ve largely done this. That’s why general education courses have declined by 30% over the last 80 years so career development can take center stage.
Dual credit or concurrent enrollment programs, which allow high school students to earn college credits for gen ed courses, save students money and time for their future collegiate career. Anecdotally, several of my friends and I went into college with a year of school already complete. A good friend from high school used this endowment to graduate a year early; I used it to take on a second major. Over 60% of Iowans enter college with credits under their belt. Alternatively, students can take on 18-credit semesters instead of the standard 15-credit one or take summer courses at a community college and transfer credits back to their home institution.
These are great strategies students can use to reduce the cost of higher education that don’t water down the value of a liberal arts education. They have been explicitly designed by the education bureaucracy to improve affordability in a landscape where legislators are failing to properly invest in these services. Students are active agents and engaged planners in the collegiate marketplace, and can utilize the liberal arts structure, along with these cost reduction strategies, to craft a college education that best serves them.
In the end, the liberal arts education should be allowed to stand in the wider educational marketplace. Yes, it should evolve with the times, but shredding or diluting it is not the answer. We need effective communicators and critical thinkers now more than ever, and a diverse and rich education is essential to that. We should absolutely invest in trade school, apprenticeships, and other new training and qualification structures. Consolidation of small colleges and the collapse of for-profit schools as the student population shrinks is inevitable, and we should design a public education landscape to ensure a geographically diverse population has access to quality training programs while these trends continue. This will involve a diverse approach of investments in some areas, streamlining in others, and the careful stewardship of resources. But ending small degree programs, loosening course requirements, watering down curriculum, and maligning the liberal arts education will not resolve our collegiate woes.
What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening to
I’m Over the Erewhonification of Fancy Grocery Stores: “These grocery stores feel winnowed of passion and even self-involvement. They are places where a handful of Brussels sprouts, cut for you and placed into plastic, costs $17, for people who see food primarily as a form of “optimization,” social status, or table decor for a TikTok Day in My Life. I want food to feel fun, hedonistic, and pleasurable, not fraught and neurotic in the way these stores inspire.”
We asked our climate reporters to highlight one idea for positive change. We got a chronicle of global transformation: Global efforts are speeding up at all kinds of scales in countries on every continent. The momentum for a better world is building.
Which many students don’t want. Many like being able to take unrelated culture, fine arts, or literature classes as a break from the normal curriculum.