Why do colleges In the U.S. require...

[AtlanteanTroll]

Where on Earth is this ridiculous idea coming from that all the post-secondary schools in the United States are liberal arts styled? Because that just isn't true.

[danzibr]

It's a cash grab.

[noparlpf]

Where on Earth is this ridiculous idea coming from that all the post-secondary schools in the United States are liberal arts styled? Because that just isn't true.

Compared to some other countries, the standard model in the US (with gen ed requirements as well as major requirements) is "liberal arts."

[AtlanteanTroll]

General education requirements are the antithesis of a liberal arts education.

[noparlpf]

General education requirements are the antithesis of a liberal arts education.

I think the idea is to force students to get a liberal arts education whether they want to or not. So you're not wrong about the spirit of it, but that's what that model is often called.

[Jay R]

Because without cross-class ranks in Knowledge (Architecture and Engineering), Roy would never have beaten Thog in the arena.

[noparlpf]

Because without cross-class ranks in Knowledge (Architecture and Engineering), Roy would never have beaten Thog in the arena.

If Roy were actually that smart he wouldn't have gone straight Fighter in 3.X and wouldn't have needed Knowledge (Architecture and Engineering) to beat Thog.

[Rockphed]

General education requirements are the antithesis of a liberal arts education.

That depends on the nature of the requirement. Requiring that degrees only be awarded to students who show a sufficient breadth of education seems proper. Also, remember that the Liberal Arts are grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, logic, geometry, music, and astronomy. A devotee of one subject who is wholly ignorant of the others is not properly educated to receive a degree.

[Bulldog Psion]

Well, when I entered the university, my parents were pressuring me to be a computer programmer. Tried it, hated it. Additionally, the guy running the department loathed me at first sight, and the feeling was mutual, so I departed from that.

Ended up majoring in economics. I was good at it and enjoyed it.

However, I also took some meteorology and geology classes to satisfy the science requirements.

I ended up as a professional freelance writer. I'd say I've easily made 400% of the money on geology and meteorology articles that I've made on economics articles. You never know what's going to be useful in the long run.

Additionally, I find that I appreciate life a little more because of that extra bit of knowledge. When it starts raining, I know why; when I look at a landscape, I know what forces shaped it, and can imagine those slow, majestic, elemental changes as they must have played out over thousands or millions of years...

My two silver pieces on why the U.S. university setup has something to recommend it.

[Jay R]

If Roy were actually that smart he wouldn't have gone straight Fighter in 3.X and wouldn't have needed Knowledge (Architecture and Engineering) to beat Thog.

It's not about being smart. It's about being educated. I left college with the same IQ I went in with, but with much more knowledge.

[And after Roy's father was so insulting about Fighters, there was no chance Roy would become anything else.]

[AtlanteanTroll]

That depends on the nature of the requirement. Requiring that degrees only be awarded to students who show a sufficient breadth of education seems proper. Also, remember that the Liberal Arts are grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, logic, geometry, music, and astronomy. A devotee of one subject who is wholly ignorant of the others is not properly educated to receive a degree.

No, not even.

It is true that those seven areas of study are part of the liberal arts--though that's a dated understanding, as the modern liberal arts also encompass literature, history, language, philosophy, and science--but requirements serve to limit the scope of ones' education. Even if you do have a more dedicated area of study with your major.

The liberal arts are about getting more generally educated, yes, but in the collegiate setting, they're also about smaller classes sizes and lower teacher-to-student ratios. The idea that American schools generally fall into that style is ridiculous. What people are describing in this thread again and again are private schools, which definitely don't make up the majority of the student population. I'd be shocked if they even made up a plurality.

[Rockphed]

No, not even.

It is true that those seven areas of study are part of the liberal arts--though that's a dated understanding, as the modern liberal arts also encompass literature, history, language, philosophy, and science--but requirements serve to limit the scope of ones' education. Even if you do have a more dedicated area of study with your major.

The liberal arts are about getting more generally educated, yes, but in the collegiate setting, they're also about smaller classes sizes and lower teacher-to-student ratios. The idea that American schools generally fall into that style is ridiculous. What people are describing in this thread again and again are private schools, which definitely don't make up the majority of the student population. I'd be shocked if they even made up a plurality.

Class size at the community college I attended averaged about 30.

Class size at the private university I attended averaged about 100 for non-technical classes. It averaged about 20 for in-major technical classes, but that was mostly because the lab rooms only had so many seats.

I'm not even sure what you are saying in the first half of your post. "Requirements serve to limit the scope of one's education?" I am not following your logic there.

[Diamondeye]

Fine art credits for virtually all degrees? A buddy of mine is about to go to college for a computer science/engineering degree(major/minor), and he apparently HAS to take a fine arts or language class even though it has absolutely NOTHING to do with his degree.

You answered your own question. A little knowledge of other languages is undeniably useful. Frankly, they're going easy on you by allowing fine arts as a choice.

[noparlpf]

I can understand requiring foreign languages. (And I regret that I've lost so much of my Spanish to disuse since finishing my college requirements, because I used to speak proficiently if not fluently.) The US seems to be one of the only countries these days where the majority of the population is only monolingual (at best), and the people who are bilingual are primarily the children of recent immigrants whose families still speak other languages. (Heck, even though my grandfather's parents spoke like four or five languages each he can only speak English himself.) Whereas most European countries seem to expect people to speak at least 2-3 languages proficiently.

[Knaight]

As regards covering things in high school - to some extent that just isn't practical. There's a class of subjects that can be reasonably assumed to be fairly universal, but there's also classes of subjects which are wide enough that only a small portion can be taught. Meanwhile, it's still helpful for people to have a broader knowledge, even when it's possible for people to game the system by just replicating classes they took in high school to some extent.

Languages are an excellent example of this. My highschool had three foreign languages, covering only Spanish, French, and German. Other schools that were available added Latin, but that was about it for the town. A different focus probably could have added a few more, but the highschool was simply too small to support dozens of languages. The university does that with no trouble. A highschool probably has one or two history classes to chose from for any given grade, plus an AP and/or IB version in better funded schools. A university can cover much more material. In both of these cases, someone could just take the language they took in highschool and a history class that maps to highschool material in the hope of an easy A; these can also help people get a broader understanding.

There's also the matter of how a lot of U.S. highschools just do a terrible job, whereas the standards are generally higher for universities. Sure, the existence of some classes can be mandated, but there's no good way to get around the legions of parents whining about how they personally don't like that their child was assigned some book and it thus has to be removed from the curriculum and school library; there's no good way to get around the influences of people who just don't want to be there and disrupt things, so on and so forth. Even in a near ideal scenario, highschools are working with people who enter with 8-10 years of previous schooling (with the 10 case including kindergarten and assuming a highschool starting at 10th grade), colleges are working with people who enter with 12-13. That makes a lot of difference regarding what skills and previous knowledge can be expected, and thus what doesn't need to take class time.

[Psyren]

I can possibly accept that in highschool, but in college? If you don't already know how to examine problems from multiple angles you shouldn't be in college in the first place.

That's the point though, you have to prove it. It's not enough to say "okay, he got in, he must be able to come at problems from multiple angles." Accredited institutions have to evidence that before you get your degree.

Basically you have it backwards - high school is what doesn't matter, in multiple ways.

[noparlpf]

That's the point though, you have to prove it. It's not enough to say "okay, he got in, he must be able to come at problems from multiple angles." Accredited institutions have to evidence that before you get your degree.

Basically you have it backwards - high school is what doesn't matter, in multiple ways.

Shouldn't the high school transcript and/or entrance/placement exams cover that? Rather than four semesters and $16k-$120k tuition just to repeat all the basics?

But yeah American high school is basically a joke. A really bad joke.

[Knaight]

Shouldn't the high school transcript and/or entrance/placement exams cover that? Rather than four semesters and $16k-$120k tuition just to repeat all the basics?

You generally can test out of a lot of stuff, and there are a number of highschool programs that get college credit in some way, whether it's going to community college while also in highschool (which is paid by the district), AP/IB college equivalent classes, or even highschool study groups that aim to get you to pass CLEP tests.

[noparlpf]

You generally can test out of a lot of stuff, and there are a number of highschool programs that get college credit in some way, whether it's going to community college while also in highschool (which is paid by the district), AP/IB college equivalent classes, or even highschool study groups that aim to get you to pass CLEP tests.

Where I've been, "testing out" just meant you could start at a higher level (calc 2 instead of calc 1 or algebra, for example) but you still needed to fill the credits. So instead of testing out of Spanish 1 and then only needing Spanish 2, I had to take Spanish 2 and then wait a year for Spanish 3 to be offered again.

And some schools also don't accept AP courses as two-semester courses (like Chem 1/2 and Physics 1/2), so you end up having to redo the second half even though the AP courses typically cover both semesters. I said forget that and just took both semesters of Physics over so I wouldn't forget it all in the interim.

Long story short, high school was a huge waste of time for me after maybe tenth grade.

[Psyren]

Shouldn't the high school transcript and/or entrance/placement exams cover that? Rather than four semesters and $16k-$120k tuition just to repeat all the basics?

In a word, no. Quality varies wildly at the high school level, and attempts to standardize a high school education (GED, SAT, ACT etc.) tend to focus on the more quantitative and easily-quizzed subjects like grammar and math, neglecting the fine arts entirely. So to keep up with the rest of the world, where an intellectual is a truly well-rounded individual, this requirement has to be enforced at the post-secondary (college) level.

But yeah American high school is basically a joke. A really bad joke.

Public schools especially. But discussing that further will probably lead to political areas.

[Douglas]

Where I've been, "testing out" just meant you could start at a higher level (calc 2 instead of calc 1 or algebra, for example) but you still needed to fill the credits. So instead of testing out of Spanish 1 and then only needing Spanish 2, I had to take Spanish 2 and then wait a year for Spanish 3 to be offered again.

Where I went to college I tested out of a bunch of courses, some through Advanced Placement exam results for high school courses, some through taking a test at the college, and I received credit as if I had taken and passed each course I tested out of. The only difference from actually taking them was that they were left out of GPA calculations.

[noparlpf]

Where I went to college I tested out of a bunch of courses, some through Advanced Placement exam results for high school courses, some through taking a test at the college, and I received credit as if I had taken and passed each course I tested out of. The only difference from actually taking them was that they were left out of GPA calculations.

That sounds like a decent system. I'd be okay with that. As long as it means high school meant something.

[Rockphed]

That sounds like a decent system. I'd be okay with that. As long as it means high school meant something.

Honestly, high school means nothing if you go on to higher education. If I could do it over, I would either finagle how to graduate a couple years early, or just get a GED and go to community college for a couple years. I would have spent less time angry at the world and might have learned proper study habits instead of having to unlearn how to sleep and read my way through class, never do homework, and ace all tests ever.

[Solaris]

While I agree it's nice that people know how to properly compose a sentence, I again point to elementary-middle school. If you didn't learn how to do those things at that point in time, I'm not really sure you're college material, as that is literally the most basic of basic stuff.

I loathe the English/writing requirements after high school. I disliked them back in high school and elementary school, but at least then I wasn't paying for them out of pocket. Leaving aside that my own writing abilities are more than adequate for just about anything short of writing the next Great American Novel, if the first twelve years didn't stick, why would they think the next two to four would?

They just want students to be well-rounded and get a broader perspective, really.

That's swell, but you're not going to get either of those in a college classroom. Furthermore, I'd like to not have to waste money to get a degree simply to justify the continued existence of a department that's utterly worthless to me. I'm barely scraping by as it is, and I have more life experience than most of my professors - why in God's name should I be wasting my money on a 'well-rounded and broader perspective' handed to me in canned form by an academic when it won't help me in the least?

In theory, you're giving all children a solid foundation for the rest of your lives. In practice, it's teenage day care. I have had a teacher chastise me for getting ahead of the class. That's right - I was actually told to stop learning so much.

I had to teach my senior year math teacher advanced algebra so she could teach me advanced algebra. I literally had to help her through the material I'd learned in junior year before I transferred so she could go through the motions of 'teaching' it to me while the rest of the class wasted their time with arithmetic.
I wish I was joking.
I also wish I'd managed to get something beyond algebra out of the school system, but that would have required some baseline competence that just wasn't in there.

[Zrak]

I hate it when people say they have "life experience." What is that supposed to mean? Everyone has life experience. I drank some coffee this morning, when I was neither dead nor unconscious. That was life, I experienced it. Do you mean you have consumed more coffee than your professors? Or do you mean that you have a wider variety of experiences, like you've tried a higher total number of beverages than them? Or do you mean your experiences have more value than theirs, like you drink meaningful coffee and they don't? Who decides this?

Also, you wish you were joking. When forming sentences that do not describe objective facts, such as hypothetical or counter-factual statements, one uses the subjunctive mood. For example, one might say "if your writing abilities were more than adequate, you would know how to use the subjunctive mood," or "if I were going to write a post about having nothing to learn from an English class, I would check my grammar more carefully before posting it."

[Rockphed]

I loathe the English/writing requirements after high school. I disliked them back in high school and elementary school, but at least then I wasn't paying for them out of pocket. Leaving aside that my own writing abilities are more than adequate for just about anything short of writing the next Great American Novel, if the first twelve years didn't stick, why would they think the next two to four would?

While I agree with you that elementary and secondary writing classes tend towards uselessness, I disagree with your conclusion that elementary and secondary methods are necessarily the same as the old college try. I took 4 writing classes in my college career. 2 I failed miserably. 1 I barely scraped by in. 1 I flourished in. The one I barely scraped by in was perhaps the most useful because it was taught by somebody who knew that writing and dissecting literature is not what the english language was created to do (in so far as the people who created the english language had any intention while they made it up).

No the english language is designed to lie to people. That we can lie about things that don't even exist is a product of our humanity, not any virtue of our shared language. We lie about how much the eggs we want too buy are worth, and then we lie about how much the gold (or silver or copper) disks are worth. We like about everything, including that we are lying. And when we stretch our powers of lying just right, we change the universe, and our lies become truth.

[Douglas]

And when we stretch our powers of lying just right, we change the universe, and our lies become truth.

For example, most forms of currency have value only because everyone thinks they do.

[Zrak]

It's not even just currency. It's really anything to which people attribute value or, for that matter, any other abstract concept.

[Scarlet Knight]

I hate it when people say they have "life experience." What is that supposed to mean?

"If Johnny knocks over a 7-11 at 3am and takes $200.13 plus 1 case of Mountain Dew and can run 5 miles an hour while the police chasing him can go 50 miles per hour, how many years in Attica will he receive?"

[Zrak]

Trick question, no way Johnny's going to a supermax.