I graduated from college in 1976. Higher education was in a state of maximum flux at that time, and the idea of "required courses" was fast disappearing. When I entered college, there were four courses every student needed for graduation. By the time I graduated, the only required course was six hours of Western Civilization. That, too, was dumped a few years later.
The revolutionary spirit that swept campuses during the Vietnam era wasn't only political. The entire college experience was undergoing a massive overhaul. There were more majors, more elective courses. Students were encouraged to indulge their curiosity and explore their interests.
We weren't quite at the "How to Watch Television" stage of elective courses, but the path to banality and stupidity was clearly open. By the turn of the 21st century, colleges had begun to offer elective courses in "The Amazing World of Bubbles," "Tree Climbing," and "The Social Role of Mustaches in 19th-Century Prussia."
Today, there's a movement afoot to end such "time-wasting" courses, and offer only instruction in a student's primary field of study. Is this really a good thing?
With a growing percentage of students entering college from the workforce and not after graduating high school, there is little logic in requiring elective courses at all. Adults with jobs and children have little time to waste on taking courses such as "Art History" or "Appreciating Mozart."
While some electives provide little direct career training, some educators argue that these classes can broaden perspectives or, as noted in The Chronicle of Higher Education, offer a chance to explore passions.
“College is too expensive to be a career exploration program,” writes Joe Biden's education secretary, Miguel Cardona.
Cardona has a point, but only a small one. With state universities charging $20,000-$35,000 in tuition, fees, and housing, and private schools charging $50,000-$100,000, of course, the primary focus should be on learning about your major course of study.
I had the tremendous luxury of entering college in 1972 without a clue what I wanted to do with my life. In the first two years, I took a wide variety of courses before settling on "Fine Arts" for my major. It hardly mattered. Upon leaving college, entry-level jobs in business, finance, retail, and other industries were plentiful. It just wasn't something I worried about.
That's not so today. It's almost necessary to decide what you want to do with your life before deciding where to go to college. To my mind, students are losing something valuable by having to choose a life path so early.
The average American will change their careers three times over their lifetime. Most of us will change jobs 3-7 times over our working lives. This is my fourth career after I started in retail, then moved into non-profit management, went into sales, and finally ended up a writer. I can't say college "prepared" me for any of those careers. But I was a better worker, employee, and manager because of my educational experience.
That experience included taking elective courses far outside the boundaries of my major field of study. Is it wise to eliminate most elective courses from the college experience?
Tom Fisher, a professor of architecture at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, says “It may be that we’re going in the completely wrong direction," on eliminating electives. Fisher says his own career benefited from the electives he studied.
"Instead of getting rid of electives and getting everybody to move really fast down a prescribed curriculum, maybe the greatest value would be a place to say, Hey, come on in and you can take anything.”
Chronicle of Higher Education:
Education has long had debates about how much choice students should have. In the late 19th century, amid tremendous scientific and industrial upheaval, educators fretted that students were attending college for mainly social reasons and to foster business connections. Many were no longer interested in commonly required coursework, like ancient languages. Charles Eliot, the longtime president of Harvard University, believed that students would be more engaged if they had more opportunities to make choices that aligned with their interests.
He shifted Harvard’s curriculum almost entirely to elective choice; he debated the stringency of requirements and prescribed curricula with the presidents of other Ivy League institutions, who argued that higher education should not stray from a classical education. James McCosh, then president of Princeton University, argued that giving students vast choice in the curriculum was “a bid for popularity” and that students (whom McCosh thought inherently lazy) would just fill their schedule with easy courses.
“The electives give the space to recognize our inability to know that,” Johann Neem, a professor of history at Western Washington University, says. “Education is idiosyncratic and personal.” The electives are a form of play — for both the student and the professor, which opens up the possibility of a connection. “It’s hard to find the thing that makes us a human and makes us able to be mentors, and it’s often in those idiosyncratic classes where we’re allowed to pursue a little bit of our passion.”
"What makes us human" is, I believe, the key. Our species is constantly on the hunt for knowledge. It's a thirst that cannot be quenched. Expanding our knowledge of the trivial or unimportant can deepen our understanding of something more important than a job or a career.
It can help us understand ourselves. Ultimately, that should be the goal of education, no matter how expensive it is.
