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Colleges struggle to help students answer the question, 'Why am I taking this class?'
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Like a lot of undergraduates, Yulianna Estrada arrived in college excited about her major. What didn’t particularly interest her? Fulfilling her general-education requirements. In fact, she put them off until her junior year, packing her schedule at Boston University with biomedical engineering and pre-med courses instead. General education, by contrast, was something “that I just had to get done,” she says.
When she finally dug into her options, Estrada was pleasantly surprised. A sociology course tackled the complex topic of gender. A history course got her thinking about the ethical dilemmas embedded in medicine. She learned, for example, that some early advances in gynecology were made at the expense of enslaved women. For her final project she included research on lobotomies, which were used at times on women who were considered difficult or different.
In her future career Estrada would like to create better prosthetics for amputees. Her gen-ed courses, she says, have made her think more deeply about the ethics of designing devices that go into the human body. None of the courses in her major delved into the human costs that underlie the evolution of medicine and medical devices. Those she found only in the Hub, as BU calls its gen-ed program.
“Sometimes we don’t think about it in that way. We just think about it as a medical device that just happened to be created,” she says. “But we don’t know why or who was being experimented on.”
Estrada’s experience with her gen-ed courses is the ideal version of what it is supposed to be. A distinct element of American undergraduate education, this set of required courses is intended to give students a broad liberal-arts-based education, one that complements and expands on what they learn in their given major.
Instead, many students and more than a few professors see it as something of an unwanted party guest: demanding, dull, and unavoidable. And the fault lies with colleges themselves. Many left their general-education requirements untended for decades, allowing them to grow haphazardly, like weeds.
On many campuses general ed still takes the shape of a checklist: two courses from this category, three from that. Because there...