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Several alert readers tagged me on Twitter yesterday in response to Paul Hanstedt’s piece in Inside Higher Ed. The piece is about the “distribution requirement” model of general education, and in broad terms, Hanstedt is against it. Among its faults, he argues, are that it’s incoherent, it’s infantilizing, it’s demotivating for both faculty and students, and it doesn’t account for how problem solving works in the real world.
All of which is mostly, if not entirely, true. I’ve been making similar arguments publicly for nearly 15 years, to little avail. What accounts for the stickiness of the checklist model?
At one level, Hanstedt’s lived reality doesn’t match mine. He writes of students who “studied for the SAT, visited colleges, wrote application essays, [and] asked their teachers for letters of recommendation. They spent months checking their email, nervous every time they got online.” That’s a decent description of traditional-age undergrads at selective colleges and universities, but it’s not terribly accurate about most students at community colleges. At colleges that screen out students whose academic preparation was spotty, there may be a credible argument against redundancy: If they already got a strong general education in high school, why replicate it? But we don’t screen out students with spotty preparation; in fact, we get many of them. Here, the argument from redundancy just isn’t persuasive.
But there’s still enough overlap to be recognizable. He notes, correctly, that any attempt at gen ed reform immediately bumps into the “turf” problem. Enrollments are powerful drivers of resources. Getting a course to count as a gen ed improves its odds of running; getting it required ensures its viability. To the extent that the distribution model reflects the internal organization of the faculty into departments, you can expect affected departments to defend their requirements vigorously. To a political scientist, it’s a straightforward example of interest-group pluralism. Distribution requirements tend to take the form of political compromises, because that’s precisely what they are. There is simply no such thing as robust shared governance without politics. It’s the price of admission.
That’s not to deny that faculty believe, in good faith, that their courses matter. Of course they do. But any proposed alternative that ignores the bread-and-butter side of the argument is likely to fail.
Separate from the politics is the administrative question. The history department staffs history classes, and the English department staffs English classes. Who’s responsible for the interdisciplinary class on, say, historical fiction? Many colleges struggle with “student success” courses for this reason; if everybody owns it, then nobody does. We could, in theory, organize without departments, but that leads to other questions.
Hanstedt’s piece leaves out another key factor. While very selective colleges may mostly be in control of their own requirements, community colleges are not. We’re subject both to state requirements and to the de facto requirements of transfer. We take students with previous credits earned elsewhere, and we transfer students on to four-year schools where they expect our credits to be honored. In practice, that means using course labels that fit neatly into existing boxes.
In my own state, for instance, the current rules require set numbers of gen ed credits for each major degree type. (A.A. degrees need 45, A.S. need 30 and A.A.S. need 20.) Compliance with that law requires that we designate certain courses as counting toward those totals, and others not. Worse, the law also requires a set distribution within the total: so many in communication skills, so many in social science and the like. Again, compliance requires that each course fit cleanly into a given slot. Courses that don’t fit neatly into boxes might not be counted, or might not be accepted upon transfer. (Or, which amounts to the same thing, they might be accepted only as "free electives.")
The quirks of transfer frequently mean that four-year colleges can offer all manner of innovative and interdisciplinary freshman seminars, but they won’t take ours. Our courses have to fit in the checklist or they don’t count. Innovation becomes a class prerogative, available only to those who can afford to start at a four-year. The Princetons of the world can offer what they want; we have to offer Composition.
The most frustrating part of the current arrangement, as Hanstedt correctly notes, is that it forces students to eat their vegetables before they get to what they consider the good stuff. You might be able to get away with that with high-commitment students, but it’s an attrition generator among students who aren’t entirely sure about the whole college thing in the first place. Oddly enough, the one place I’ve worked that understood that was DeVry. Instead of front-loading its gen eds, it ran the gen ed and major courses in parallel throughout the program. The idea was to get students doing something they recognized as relevant from the start. When it stuck to two-year degrees, it had considerably higher graduation rates than its neighboring community colleges. I’m still convinced that there’s merit in the concept, even though I had serious concerns about how DeVry specifically implemented it.
If we want community colleges to start experimenting with more innovative and interesting versions of gen ed -- and I absolutely do -- we need to do a few other things first. Rewrite the laws and regs that write disciplines in stone. Compel four-year colleges to take gen ed en banc, even when the courses have funny names. And provide enough funding that folks internally don’t respond to every new idea as an existential threat. In the absence of those steps, I can see interest-group politics winning by default for another 15 years.
