Howard: General education requirements misuse students’ money

If you spend $21,765 on a new Honda Accord, you can customize at least 30 different features on… If you spend $21,765 on a new Honda Accord, you can customize at least 30 different features on the car including whether it’s a manual or automatic, if it comes with a first aid kit or not and what kind of mats are on the inside.. You can customize the car to fit your needs and goals and to build the best vehicle for you as an individual.

In contrast, if you spend $23,042 on a year’s out-of-state tuition to attend the School of Arts and Sciences at Pitt, you are ordered to fulfill six Foundational Skills Requirements and 13 General Education Requirements that include courses in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and — in a nod to leftists’ multiculturalism — “Global Citizenship.”

It’s natural for the purchaser to make decisions in a business transaction, but at Pitt, we pay the University large sums of money and then allow them to make momentous decisions for us. After all, the gen eds and “Foundational Skills” imposed on us by the University amount to up to 19 required classes — that’s four semesters of our college experience.

I can’t speak for readers, but I came to Pitt for an education that would benefit me professionally and personally throughout the rest of my life, not an education that University bureaucrats have decided will make me a better “citizen of the world.”

The problem is that Pitt is not alone in imposing such requirements on its customers/students. I can’t simply take my money and go to another school if I don’t like the concept of gen eds because every major college and university seem to have them.

Without other educational options, I’m at Pitt, taking intro courses in a subject I don’t care about simply because the University decided that the class is useful for me.

Besides the issue of consumer choice, required courses artificially inflate enrollment in certain classes and keep courses available, professors employed and departments functioning when there is no actual demand for them. I’ve taken a number of classes simply to fulfill a University requirement and they have not— with one or two exceptions— been of the same quality as the classes I’ve taken in my major.

Instead, classes I’ve taken to fulfill requirements tend to be large lecture courses filled with hundreds of students and taught without any discussion or participation from the students. Moreover, the information in these courses is often a rehashing of high school material — Intro to Renaissance Art was fun and all, but my high school Honors Humanities course did just as good a job of covering Leonardo da Vinci.

In my three years at Pitt, gen eds have taught me little of lasting value and consistently failed to match the quality of other courses offered at Pitt.

What’s worse is that the decision of what to require and what not to require allows the University to impose its values on malleable students. Nowhere is this more evident than in the “Global Citizenship” set of requirements that emphasizes international cultures and languages.

There is nothing wrong with a student choosing to emphasize these courses in his or her studies out of his or her own free will, but the University requires that four classes fall into this category without allowing students any say.

An important question to ask in this context is, “Where are the requirements emphasizing American citizenship?” After all, a majority of students at Pitt are American citizens and would tangibly benefit from a clearer understanding of their rights and responsibilities as American citizens.

But multiculturalism is a fad in American education in a way that understanding what it means to be an American never will be, and so students at Pitt must take four classes within the category and fulfill a foreign language requirement to satisfy the ideologies of the University.

As students, our time will always be wasted by required intro classes that emphasize the priorities of academia rather than the priorities of the individual until higher education is understood as a product on the market no different than another good or service. Indeed, we already buy and sell education like a commodity in this nation, and just like any other product, the best education often goes to the highest bidder.

It’s time to bring the buying and selling of education out into the open and recognize that the proper relationship between a student and a school is like that between a customer and a car dealer. No more paternalism.

Continue the conversation at Giles’s blog, http://www.gilesbhoward.com/blog/, or e-mail Giles at gbh4@pitt.edu.