Should a College Success Course Carry Gen Ed Status?

'Students have changed, and we need to change for them.' Opinion By Matt Reed at Inside Higher Ed.

"Historically, 'general education. was intended to fill in the cultural gaps noted among the sons of the upper classes. (I’m thinking here of Columbia University’s program in the early 1900s.) Gentlemen needn’t be bothered with “vocational” education -- they had graduate programs for that -- and given that many of them had attended prep schools (and that the “gentleman’s C” was a real thing) they could be assumed to understand the rules of school. Instead, general education arose as a sort of guarantor of a shared cultural heritage.

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"In the community college world, gen ed took on a different meaning. Rather than serving as an introduction to the canon, it quickly became a sort of common denominator. Given the curricular expansiveness of community colleges -- very much including vocational programs -- there had to be something consistent in every degree. Rather than defining excellence, it evolved into a sort of floor: whatever a student may have studied, they should be able to communicate well in writing, understand quantitative reasoning and the like. Instead of a canon of texts, we looked to a set of skills. If a student wanted to go on to study the great books, more power to them, but most wouldn’t, and that’s OK."