With all the attention on budgets and shrinking educational committees to save money, there needs to be a reformation of the general education requirements at CCSU. Originally set up to produce more well-rounded individuals, students are now being told they can’t graduate because they haven’t fulfilled a skill-area requirement for their major.
While no one is arguing that we need to be less ‘well-rounded,’ we are saying that the vast majority of these courses are not necessary to strengthen one’s major or passion. A communication major shouldn’t need to worry so much about how many chemistry credits he or she may have. A chemistry major will likely not see the benefit of taking a sociology course.
The university has a vast array of courses that they offer to build a stronger mind, but they seem to forget that we are choosing what to study and paying for it. Never should the administration tell a student that they have to take a certain course which does not pertain to their major. It just leads to redundancies and weak learning experiences.
Students in courses that they are being made to take, and have little to no interest in, will not give their full attention and effort. The knowledge that one gathers in an introductory course is shallow; most of us don’t retain much of what we learn in those classes beyond the final exam.
Too many students complain about how it takes them more than four years to graduate from this institution, but most of this is caused by the staggering amount of skill area requirements that we are required to fulfill. More than half of your education will be spent in classrooms listening to lectures in emphases that aren’t affiliated with your major. On your major’s advising sheet, you can see the courses you need. A media studies major in the Communication department will only need to take 57 credits between their major and selected minor, the rest of their 122 total credits will be filled in with general education courses.
What about those students who are enrolled in the new journalism course of study? Any one of these young, impressionable individuals will spend hundreds of hours crafting written works comprised of correct grammar, properly structured sentences and eloquent verbiage. They, too, will toil over the written works of others – from the daily reading of a newspaper to the textbooks, blogs and articles that will act as the foundation of their newly acquired knowledge. Yet these students will be forced to sit through a semester of American literature. As journalism students, we already love to read. Does this make sense?
Some suggestions: A comprehensive mathematics course to lay the framework for strategic thinking; a foundational freshman composition course to ensure all CCSU students are on the same level of reading and writing and a philosophy course to ensure that we all have a basic level of critical thinking skills (and to ensure the department doesn’t dissolve entirely).
With the possibility that universities in the CSU system will receive less funding because of lower graduation rates, it doesn’t bode well for the school to indirectly force a student to stay here for five or more years because he lacks a science lab on his otherwise complete transcript. Governor Malloy has made it clear that the budgets will need to be trimmed back and that the graduation rates are too low, let’s help him out on both fronts by taking a very close look at the general education requirements in each major.
Administrators and students should be working together in the very near future to make a system that works. It should seem obvious that a student will perform better in their desired field if they’ve spent more time in classes in their major. Today, that idea doesn’t seem apparent to those that are making a student’s path to graduation more difficult.
