For Flexibility

My gut reaction is to argue for the ability to drop classes. I knew from the moment I read the prompt that this would be my stance, and I know why. There have been numerous times throughout my college career that I have been confused why a given class would be required for my major. Currently, I am in a required Physics course in which I can see no relevance to what I want to do with my life. This alone isn’t a reason to allow this course to be dropped, as it could be that my entire major doesn’t fit with my life plans. This isn’t the case, however: these courses also have seemingly no relevance to the discipline of my major, Nuclear Engineering, at all.

In his post on this subject, Tyler brings up a good point: the people who decide which classes are required for our majors are the experts in our field, and so it would be a mistake to think we know any better. I agree with this idea: our department heads should have the final say on what coursework constitutes successful completion of a degree. I’m less supportive, however, of the idea of a “set-in-stone” course sequence.

During one of our class discussions on “Declining by Degrees”, I remember the idea of the decreasing worth of a Bachelor’s Degree being brought up. (I’m interested to see if this topic is breached at all in the movie.) In short, the argument is that a bachelor’s degree twenty (fifty? I’m not exactly sure of the time frame here) years ago was a guaranteed ticket to the job your major trained you for, but the same degree today is just a stepping stone towards a career. I believe it. More than one of my engineering professors have framed the bachelor’s degree as a test of “basic training”; to achieve further success in the engineering discipline, post-graduate education is extremely recommended, if not required.

What, then, is the final goal of earning an engineering bachelor’s degree? With my professors’ argument in mind, I would have to say that it is accumulating the basic engineering skills required for post-graduate education or training. This is a pretty concrete goal, at least for an engineering degree, because there exist nationally-accepted requirements for officially earning the “Engineer” title for all of the major engineering disciplines and many of the secondary ones (including Nuclear). The National Academy of Engineering is the governing body of these guidelines, and one only needs to take a Professional Engineering Exam to prove one’s aptitude and earn an engineering license.

What if the department heads, instead of assigning a sequence of courses required for graduation, made a list of knowledge and skills that a student must accrue to earn their degree? The list would not be a short one: I imagine it encompassing everything earning a degree by the current system involves. The difference, however, comes from the fact that this new system allows any course that teaches a skill or topic of knowledge that is on the list to count towards graduation.

Obviously, many items on the list would be pretty narrow, and couldn’t be fulfilled by more than one specific course. For instance, “Student Knows How to Solve Differential Equations” could probably only be achieved by a Differential Equations course. I’m confident, however, that some of the requirements are more general and could be fulfilled by a number of courses: this is why “professional electives” exist. In my major, at least, there is a required sub-set of courses that can be chosen among many options. My physics class is one of these courses, and the only “list item” I can think of that these courses would fulfill is “student has advanced knowledge in one topic related to scientific research.” Clearly, an enormous number of classes could fit this description.

Additionally, a publication of a requirement list would be sound with Drucker’s ideas on effective individual work, specifically, knowing one’s goals and constantly working towards them. A student who has daily access to the list of skills he or she knows must be accrued by graduation can constantly work to better themselves in these areas. The current “required sequence” style of educations seems to emphasize a different goal: good grades in each of the individual classes.

Obviously, I am proposing a change that would require the entire college (or university) to alter almost every aspect of its existence. For instance, courses university-wide would have to have their contents and “list items” determined. This is an enormous task, and a lot of time and money would have to be available to achieve what I have in mind.

I’m confident, however, that a student who knows what he or she is working towards and has more choice in the details of how to reach those goals (e.g., choice of classes) is a happier and more effective student.