I’ve been thinking a lot the past few weeks about College. Not so much the drunken memories of bad ideas from yesteryear, but rather about the sort of violence problems inherent in the system. There’s a lot sort of wrong with higher education in this country, but having a rather small sample I really can’t claim my observations are perticularly scientific. However, I do think that many of the problems could be solved with a fairly simple solution. I’ll use, oh, the not-at-all-randomly selected University of Oregon.
Now, the University of Oregon is on quarters and required 180 hours for my degree. Of those 62 hours had to be upper-division, some proportion had to be completed at the University of Oregon, 168 had to be taken for a grade (or transfer credit), 45 had to be taken at the University of Oregon for a grade, etc. The University also has, of course, general education requirements. 8 “multicultural” hours, 8 of written English, 16 of “Arts and Letters”, 16 “Social Science”, 16 “Science”, 12 hours of Mathematics for the Bachelor of Science, plus my degree requirements. I, and every other sot at the school, spent basically the first two years of his or her college experience retaking high school. Don’t believe me? The first day in WR122 (the second of two required writing courses, fortunately I’d placed out of the first) consisted of instructions in how to construct a proper thesis statement. Wait, no, excuse me, enthymeme. Yes, that’s right, they tried to teach us to construct logically unsound arguments around which to base papers. Frankly, I’d rather put all of my premises out in the open, thank-you-very-much. In any case, these are the sorts of things one should’ve learned in high school. If one didn’t, that really isn’t anyone else’s problem, and paying customers students should not be made to suffer through that sort of tripe. The same can be said for introductory World History courses, or introductory Science classes of any sort. By the time you’ve had 12 years of schooling, well, you certainly shouldn’t be unsure as to whether or not the Earth goes ’round the Sun. If you are, well, that’s your problem.
And here we have arrived at what I see as the root of the entire college problem: in order to obtain a degree, you are required to sit through what amount to another two years of high school. The material isn’t engaging, and it makes damn sure students are burned out by the time they can take the classes they’re actually interested in. So get rid of it. Instead of requiring all of that crap university wide, require 180 hours, only 30 of which can be taken pass/fail. Allow the individual departments to make whatever requirements they want: so the Journalism school might still require a bunch of the same stuff it requires, but the Mathematics department might keep the same degree requirements that they have now. Rather than “making students well-rounded” by forcing them to sample any number of the bad appetizers the university system has to offer, they would be free to take classes of their own interest and still get a degree in four years.
