Reinvigorating ‘General Education’

As a recent survey of 251,323 American college students showed, many freshmen have come to view the “general education” requirement as little more than a hoop to jump through before being allowed to take the kind of classes that can help them get ahead and get a job.

A riper climate could not be imagined for UCLA’s announcement last week of plans for radical revision of its general education curriculum. If approved by the university’s Academic Senate after a review process, the new curriculum could make general education both more relevant and rigorous.

Currently, UCLA students can satisfy the general education requirement by taking courses of their own choosing in a series of divisions. But under the new curriculum, all of UCLA’s 4,400 freshmen will be required to take a demanding, year-long “cluster course” that surveys not a single field like biochemistry, but a broad set of interrelated knowledge, like how the arts reflect political power.

Nearly half of college students nationally now drop out during freshman year, a record high. UCLA’s curriculum revision could help keep such students in class by showing that general education is not simply a means toward an end, but a tool for life.