I have been asked to join a committee that will study the general-education requirements at the University of California, Santa Cruz and will make recommendations for changes. This file http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~karplus/gen-ed.html contains my working notes on the problem, and is not an official statement by the committee. It is also a plea for feedback from faculty, advising staff, and students.

One of the other members of the committee (I forget who) has started putting together another site with general-education information: http://planning.ucsc.edu/irps/stratpln/gened.htm That site includes pointers to information about general education at several other universities, including the reports of committees similar to the one I am on.

Here are the parts I envision for the final report for the committee:

1. History of the general-education requirement, and context from other institutions (not really included in the final report)
2. Status of the current system, including faculty and student opinions (summarized only where useful to support one of our recommendations)
3. Purpose of general education (discussed very briefly in the final report)
4. Recommendations for a new system (the main body of the final report)

1. History of general education at UCSC

Click here for some comments I made at the time of the release of the CUE Report, reflecting my thinking about general education at that time. I'm now a bit more open to different models of what general education is all about (see below), but I still favor a general-education system that encourages depth as well as breadth.

2. Current status of general education at UCSC

1. Official statements about the current requirements (from the catalog, Navigator, ...)
2. What determines which codes are given to a class?
3. Faculty (and advising staff) opinion about what is right and what is wrong with the current system
4. Student opinion about what is right and what is wrong with the current system

Official statements

• General Education Requirements
• Brief Descriptions of General Education Requirements
• Minimum number of courses and credits required for major

This section should also summarize how much of the general-education requirements are not covered by the major. This will give us some idea of the constraints on the size of the general-education requirements.

I believe that the greatest constraint currently comes from the Computer Engineering major, which requires 25 courses, plus 8 lab courses, for a total of 133 credits. These courses cover the Q, W, and N requirements of the general-education, leaving A, C, E, 2H, 2S, and 3T (10 courses if there is no double counting). This makes a total of 183 credits, exceeding the normal 180 credits to graduation. Since the computer engineering program cannot be trimmed without risking loss of accreditation, there will be strong resistance to proposals that increase the size of the general-education requirements (though I would expect support for increases in the level of courses for which credit is given, or for more general-education courses that are already required for the major).

Note that some majors (such as Community Studies, with only 40 credits required for the major, most of that in one off-campus field study) put no constraints on general education. Indeed, some majors seem to be do-able in just one year of courses.

Code meaning

So far the only statement I can find is in The Navigator : Brief Descriptions of General Education Requirements. I hope to put more complete descriptions here, if they can be created.

A arts

C composition

E ethnic/third world

IH intro humanities and arts

IN intro natural sciences

IS intro social sciences

Q quantitative

T (2,3,4,5,6,7) topical

W writing-intensive

This requirement is distinguished from the others in being mainly associated with upper-division courses, though anomalously many students satisfy it by taking a freshman core course before taking the more fundamental composition course. It would make more sense to me for "W"-coded classes to require satisfaction of the "C" code as a prerequisite, though the current enrollment system used by the Registrar has no way of checking general-ed prerequisites---only specific course prerequisites.

The committee has set up a series of faculty focus groups to ask faculty their opinions of the current general-education system and what directions it should move in. The questions used to spark the discussion are at http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~karplus/gen-ed/faculty-focus.html

Student opinion

The Committee is working with staff to get substantial formal input from student focus groups.

3. Purpose of the general-education requirements

One of the best discussions of general education that I have read is the 1994 CUE report from Stanford University. It discusses the writing requirement, the foreign language requirement, the breadth requirements in humanities, social sciences, and natural science, and the culture core, including a gender studies requirement. Many of the topics they discuss are very similar to the topics we will be discussing here. I doubt that we will come to the same conclusions as the institutional cultures and constraints are different, but it is refreshing to read fairly intelligent writing on the subject.

Here are a few of the models I have thought of or had described to me. There are undoubtedly other models, or other views of these models, and I think that one of the early tasks for the committee is to articulate the models, and examine the consequences of accepting or rejecting each model.

Bureaucratic hoops

The most common student opinion seems to be that the general-education requirements are a purely formal impediment to graduation, and that great ingenuity should be exercised in minimizing the amount of work expended in satisfying the requirements.

This is not a model I want to see continue. If no better justification for the general-education requirements can be found, then perhaps they should be eliminated.

I like what Ernest Boyer has to say ( College, the Undergraduate Experience in America, page 101): Finally, the general education sequence, regardless of its structure, is not something to "get out of the way." Rather, it should, we believe, extend vertically, from the freshman to the senior years. And the integration of knowledge should also touch the major, as students move from depth to breadth and bring questions of value and meaning to their field of special study. In a properly designed baccalaureate program, general education and specialized education will be joined.

Enrollment support

Another cynical model for the general-education requirements is that they are in place to increase the enrollment for courses or departments that would otherwise not interest many students.

Many faculty have pursued getting a general-education code for their courses because of the effect such codes have on enrollment. Getting two or three codes for a course practically guarantees significant enrollment, though not necessarily by students with any interest in learning the material. Although this use (or abuse) of the general-education system is probably unavoidable, it should not be the goal or driving principle in the design of the system.

A less cynical view of enrollment support is that the gen-ed codes allow faculty to teach courses that are intellectually very valuable, but which would not be allocated resources without the extra enrollment that gen-ed provides. Interdisciplinary courses and courses aimed at educating non-majors may be easier to create with the enrollment support of the gen-ed code.

Some faculty believe that the current push for a foreign-language requirement is not motivated so much by pedagogic concerns as it is by an attempt at enrollment support for the foreign language instructors. Personally, I think that both a belief in the value of learning a second language and a desire to support the foreign-language faculty are driving the push for a foreign-language requirement.

Note: one strength of the enrollment-support model is that it ties in nicely with the way faculty resources are managed on campus. General education does not require a special budget if departments can be induced to offer the courses on their own, and the current way of allocating resources based on student enrollment in courses does ensure that general-education courses are offered. On the down side, departments sometimes offer the courses only for the enrollment, and the general-education curriculum gets watered-down by weak courses which gain enrollment because of their reputation as a no-work way to meet a particular requirement.

Essential skills

At least some of the current requirements seem to be there to ensure that students are at least minimally competent in areas that are crucial to their success as scholars. The composition requirement seems to be the epitome of this model--everyone agrees that students need to be able to write at college level and that few come into the University with this skill.

If this is the primary intent of the general-education requirements, then there needs to be a more specific set of content requirements. At the moment, students can get the "Q" code with only very minimal mathematics, and the IN, IS, IH, and T codes don't guarantee any specific skills.

The report An Overview of Methods and Strategies to Evaluate the Effectiveness of the General Education Curriculum prepared by Elyssa Niswander and Randy Nelson for the Committee on Educational Policy (November 1994) seems to assume an "essential-skills" model for general education. The report mainly contains descriptions of what other universities and colleges are doing to evaluate how well students are doing at general education. Based on this report, it seems that most of the "student outcomes" approach to general education focuses on essential skills, since the other desired outcomes are difficult or impossible to measure.

Much of the testing used to assess general education elsewhere has used multiple-choice and short-answer tests, for ease of grading the large volume. Unfortunately, some of the most important skills (such as the ability to sustain a consistent tone and a coherent argument in a paper) cannot be tested in this manner.

Choosing a major

Some view the current smorgasbord of "introduction to X" classes as being primarily for helping students to choose majors by exposing them to many different disciplines in their first two years. So far as I can see, this model is the only one that justifies limiting general-education credit to "introduction to X" courses.

Although this is certainly a possible use of general-education courses, it seems to imply that students who have already firmly chosen a major don't need to take the currently required 6 intro courses. The essay In Defense of General Education by Ann Craig (Provost of Eleanor Roosevelt College at UC San Diego) assumes two purposes for general education: choosing a major and essential skills. She splits essential skills into two parts: preparation for career and preparation for active citizenship.

Academic breadth

A fundamental part of American liberal arts education, and one that distinguishes it from much of the European university tradition, is that students should not just be specialists, but should have a broad background in many different studies. This is believed to aid them as citizens, as scholars, as productive workers, and as human beings.

The current system both supports and undermines this interpretation. Certainly, there are requirements that courses come from all divisions, but the system only gives credit for the most elementary courses in each division, so that a student attempting to get real breadth is stymied by having to take many "Mickey Mouse" classes.

A more principled application of this model would require an upper-division course in each of the academic divisions and would exclude from that courses like "statistics for social sciences", which are lower division courses from one division taught as upper division course in another.

The Engineering School at UCB has what looks like a reasonable humanities and social sciences breadth requirement, requiring six courses, with A minimum of two courses, at least one of which is in the upper division, must be taken from a single department (series requirement). (See UCB's College of Engineering undergrad requirements page for more details.

Common core

To some extent the general-education requirements are an attempt to have a common core curriculum--material and skills that all graduates of the University can be expected to know. The wide variety of ways in which the current requirements can be satisfied make it clear that this model is not being followed, expect, perhaps for the composition and writing requirements. The colleges offer core courses, which provide a tiny subset of a common core curriculum.

Shared experience

One goal that is often mentioned for the college courses is to provide students with a common experience, so that students in different disciplines can talk to each other about something academic. Right now, this seems to be largely a first-quarter-only experience (except at Stevenson College) and the topic seems to be primarily literature or the humanities.

Another approach to the same problem would be to have a common topic that can be approached in many different disciplines. For example, consider indigo. It can be studied by biologists (both the plant itself and the place the chemical has in the metabolic paths of the plants that produce it). It can be studied by artists, as it is a convenient, cheap dye for work in batik, ikat (or kasuri), sashiko, dyed paper, and so forth. It can be studied by economists (it is still an important industrial product, used for dyeing blue jeans, and historically it was even more important). It can be studied by anthropologists (it has been used worldwide, and there are several excellent ethnographic studies of different approaches to preparing and using the dye). It can be studied by chemists (the synthesis of indigo has been proposed as a simple lab exercise in organic chemistry, and more advanced students could try to apply color theory to explain why it is so blue). Indigo and the related dye woad have fairly frequent mention in literature, even modern literature if you count all the references to blue jeans.

Of course, a common topic used across disciplines would probably have to be changed fairly frequently, and would require a fair amount of effort by faculty to incorporate it with the material they wish to teach.

Political correctness

The Ethnic Studies requirement does not seem to fit into any of the above models (except, weakly, the common-core model). It appears to be required to appease minority students that their concerns are being addressed. Stanford has a similar requirement, but for gender issues rather than ethnic issues.

It is not clear that the requirement offers any significant advantage to minority students or staff, though it undoubtedly raises enrollment in classes that might otherwise have a difficult time getting enough students. I'm not convinced that requiring specific subjects for political reasons is desired, though if the common-core model is adopted, then the core could be defined to include whatever subjects the Senate agreed were essential.

Leo Laporte has put together a proposal, on which I have some comments. And I have put together a very rough draft of a proposal. Other proposals will appear as they are sent to me for posting.