CU Boulder main campus. (University of Colorado Boulder/Wikimedia Commons)
This fall, for the first time in 30 years, over half of the university’s undergraduates will get a fresh set of graduation requirements.
The General Education requirements, also referred to as Gen Ed, will replace the current Core Curriculum in the next few years. Incoming freshmen and students switching into Arts and Sciences this fall will be required to follow the Gen Ed framework, while continuing Arts and Sciences students can choose which curriculum they want to follow.
The selection options on MyCUHub’s degree audit module that shows a student’s progress through the General Education requirements.
Starting today, students can see how courses will apply to the Gen Ed requirements when they search for classes for fall semester. They can then run a special degree audit in MyCUHub to check their Gen Ed requirement progress.
The main change students will notice is the categorization of courses. The current Core Curriculum contains multiple “content areas of study.” In the Gen Ed requirements, these areas are shuffled into distribution requirements, with 12 credits each in Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences. Unchanged between the two requirement sets is “skills acquisition,” which encompasses foreign language, math and writing classes.
“[The changes] provide students the opportunity to be really creative with their education,” said Steve Leigh, professor of anthropology and dean of Arts and Sciences during the process. “It also will encourage faculty to be more creative in designing new courses.”
Cora Randall, department chair of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, co-chaired the Core Revision Committee established by the faculty’s Arts and Sciences Council. She explained that since the distribution requirements are more broad by definition, almost any course in the college will count for one of the Gen Ed requirements as well. She said this allows for students to have more room in their schedules to minor or double major and still graduate on time with 120 credits. The percent of graduating students who have double majors or minors has increased significantly in recent years.
“We felt that it would allow students to pursue specific interests or passions that they have, even if it’s outside of their major,” Randall said. “We wanted them to have a broad education, but to get depth as well.”
Six credits of Diversity coursework are included in the changes, with three each in U.S. Perspective and Global Perspective categories. This is to give students the skills to live in a “multicultural, multiethnic, transnational, and global society,” according to the curriculum website. This is one more class than required for the Core Curriculum, which only specifies the category as “human diversity.”
Paris Ferribee, who graduated in 2016 with a dual degree in communication and marketing, served on Leigh’s student advisory board during the overhaul process. She expressed excitement at the explicit nature of the diversity requirement.
“These classes were and are life changing,” Ferribee said. “But students weren’t actively seeking these courses, nor were they being exposed to them.”
The implementation of the requirement changes comes nearly six years after Leigh took on the five-year tenure as the college’s dean in 2012. He said it was clear early on there were problems with the Core Curriculum.
“I don’t think I encountered anyone who didn’t think a revision would be helpful,” Leigh said of his conversations with students about the requirements.
The revision committee consulted with the Arts and Sciences Student Government (ASSG), in addition to the dean’s advisory board, throughout the process. Garrett Schumacher, master’s student in integrated physiology and president of ASSG, said that while the organization wished there was more transparency, they’re satisfied with the outcome.
“Broadened knowledge and different perspectives and exposures is extremely important, but student input should be valued as well,” Schumacher said.
Leigh also noted that student finances were another reason that he sought to revise the curriculum, as additional unexpected semesters can be difficult for students. It’s unclear exactly why college graduation timelines are getting longer, but Leigh said that it wasn’t uncommon for students to be held back an extra semester due to unmet requirements.
The changes initially passed in Sept. 2016, with 86 percent approval. Leigh noted that it’s “unusual to see such consensus in a university,” citing the tabling of curriculum revisions last year at Duke University as an example of an unsuccessful revision effort.
Dissenting voices on the vote to overhaul included Leslie Irvine, a sociology professor. She’s chair of the Arts and Sciences curriculum committee and served on the Gen Ed implementation committee. She advocated for making smaller revisions to the Core Curriculum and expressed apprehension that the new requirements are too “siloed.”
“It is now possible for a student to graduate from CU without ever having taken a course in literature,” Irvine said. “A student can meet part of the natural science requirements by taking Intro to Psychology. I think it’s wrong-headed, but time will tell.”
Part of the new curriculum includes a five-year review cycle, which Leigh said should help prevent a situation like this from happening in the future.
“Switch Labs,” clinics designed to help current Arts and Sciences students decide whether to stick with the Core Curriculum or switch over to the General Education requirements, will be announced department by department. Students are also encouraged to meet with their advisers to see which curriculum will work best for them.
Correction: Leigh’s quote about the need for revisions has been amended to give the context that it was students specifically that he spoke to who found issues with the Core Curriculum.
Contact CU Independent Multimedia News Editor Lucy Haggard at lucy.haggard@colorado.edu.
