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Students haven’t been completing college in four years—that’s a bad thing. And since we can’t rely on Congress to make meaningful fixes—like when the House’s attempt to raise Pell Grant eligibility from 12 to 15 credits per semester fell by the wayside—reformers need to look elsewhere. That elsewhere is making cuts to the bloated core curriculum. Not all of it, of course—sadly, colleges still have to remediate what K–12 fails to teach—but much of the excess could and should be cut.
Few issues in higher ed get less attention than the growing time it takes students to earn a degree. The average time to complete a bachelor’s degree in the U.S. is now five to six years. That’s insane. The longer students stay in school, the more it costs taxpayers, delays workforce entry, and increases reliance on aid. As Jaison Abel and Richard Deitz of the New York Fed note, the clearest cost is tuition—about $6,500 a year after aid—but the bigger loss is time. These students could be working. Instead, they’re stuck in class.
One reason for the delay? Degree requirements are bloated. A standard bachelor’s degree requires about 120 credit hours, but at least 25 percent of those are unrelated to the degree itself, and probably 10 percent are completely useless.
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At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, for example, students must complete 11 general education courses—nearly as many as some majors require. A core curriculum is supposed to enrich culture, cultivate character, and expose students to a broad base of knowledge. But categories like “Social & Cultural Diversity” often translate to semesters spent in courses unmoored from academic rigor and laden with ideological messaging, which not only keeps students in college longer but also delays maturity. Glenn Ricketts, a political science professor at Raritan Valley Community College and Public Affairs Director at the National Association of Scholars, says his students “often behave like middle schoolers—who endlessly defer making adult decisions about their lives.”
Some core classes offer real value. But requiring every liberal arts student to take multiple math and science courses—or STEM majors to slog through multiple English courses and diversity studies—is a waste. They don’t retain the material anyway. I had to take a geology class to meet my core requirements, and I can’t tell you a damn thing about a rock.
I’m not saying we cut core requirements entirely.
America’s K–12 system is so weak that colleges have little choice but to spend time catching students up. Many arrive with fifth-grade reading skills and no grasp of basic civics.
Ricketts put it plainly: “An increasingly large number of students arrive for college seriously deficient in reading and writing ability … and so they need to register for remedial courses simply to get up to speed.”
So yes, we still need some core classes. STEM majors should know how to write a clear sentence. And liberal arts majors like me should know enough arithmetic to avoid embarrassing ourselves.
But colleges can still cut the fluff—like the golf class I had to take just to hit 120 credit hours, or the ideological detours into “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or other pseudo-academic electives. Does a bachelor’s degree really need 120 credit hours? Should we still be clinging to the Carnegie Unit from 1906? Does a toaster need a user manual?
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Judging by the actions of some states and institutions, the answer is increasingly no.
Indiana now requires all state universities to offer at least one bachelor’s degree that can be completed in three years. Utah’s public system is developing a streamlined Bachelor of Applied Studies. More than a dozen schools—from Portland State to the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh—have joined the new College-in-3 Exchange, a pilot program to rethink the standard degree timeline.
These aren’t signs of cutting corners—they’re signs that it’s possible to cut the nonsense while keeping what is essential to education.
Raising the Pell Grant threshold to 15 credits would likely have been an effective way to nudge students to progress more quickly; however, the fix we need to consider now is lowering the total credit hours required for a bachelor’s degree. If we want students to graduate on time, we should stop wasting their time.
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Image: “College graduate students” by Kit on Wikimedia Commons
Core is really more a set of subjects appropriate to secondary education, or high school (although the foreign language requirement at many colleges is smart, and tangible). The “trivium” and quadrivium traditionally captured some of the logic of a core. What is fascinating about core requirements, is that a university student even needs to be told what to study. The University of Texas at Austin otherwise has an arguably better version of “core” that it calls Plan II–a more tightly organized series of advanced courses that do a good job of capturing the intent of college liberal arts–but it may be too restricted for many students. Otherwise, this important essay gets at what may be the single biggest inefficiency in higher education, and this inefficiency extends into the 3 major professional graduate degree tracks as well–the JD, MDA, and MD–all of which can either be accomplished at the undergraduate level (as law is in most of the world), or accelerated (as the MD now is at NYU). Some of the “bloat” penalty is also exaggerated by the fact that most students (and faculty) take the summers off. I know of no businesses, the military, or laborers, that take the summers off–so why should university students? It is interesting that the University of Chicago originally established a quarter system because it wished to include the summers as an additional, formal academic period, leading to a total of four formal quarters–and a 3-year undergrad degree track. The quarter system is also itself compressed of course, compared to the semester format, and this allows for a faster series of sequential or varied courses and subjects to be completed. Unfortunately, UChicago let the quarter system fall over time into a merely compressed semester formatting, with no formal summer quarter.
Thd bigger issue is the necessity of grad degrees.
‘I had to take a geology class to meet my core requirements, and I can’t tell you a damn thing about a rock.’
You once made fun of the guys at that school you atteneded in Mississippi, who picked their noses in class, if you are to be believed. But you reveal yourself to have been as dumb as a rock! If you learned nothing about rocks, that’s your damn fault.
And you should have had an entire year of science. Do you know anything about stars, and DNA, or molecules, or quantum weirdness?
If not, it’s your shame!
You forgot the mandated diversity courses at UMass.