Do you feel that some % of your university/college courses were redundant and were placed in your study plan just to make it “beefier” and stretch it for 4 full years?

25 comments

  1. 4-year degrees in America aren’t supposed to be vocational or job training. They’re supposed to be a well-rounded liberal arts education. All of them require courses that aren’t directly related to the name of the degree and are very open about that.

    Also, only 46% of college graduates reported working in the field they studied in college.

  2. American education focuses on breadth in addition to depth.

    The sole purpose of college is not to prepare you for professional life.

  3. I don’t understand why I got a degree if I show up to day one of a job and they train me as if I know literally nothing. I generally consider college to be overrated and a waste of time for most people.

  4. > Do you feel that some % of your university/college courses were redundant and were placed in your study plan just to make it “beefier” and stretch it for 4 full years?

    In engineering? Not at all.

  6. I’m not working in the field of either of my college majors, but I think a lot of fine arts programs are run with marketing as a higher priority than education. My education was seriously compromised in multiple ways based on the prioritization of marketing the program over things like having enough chairs and stands, having enough pianos for required piano courses, or having enough professors for required courses. I actually ended up not being able to complete my major in large part because of this (I was missing half of one test, but never learned the content for it, so I did all the work for none of the reward). Needless to say, I would not have been prepared for a career in music.

    Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s uncommon in music programs, and a similar thing seems to happen in other fine arts as well.

  7. many core requirement classes are a joke. Here’s just some of the classes I took to meet core requirements that had nothing to do with my area of study (engineering).

    Social dance, a fun class to meet girls but meaningless in the end.

    Billards & bowling, a fun class that basically made gambling a college credit.

    Down hill skiing, fun again if it’s a good snowy winter.

    History of Music. No idea what it was about, the professor thought a music core requirement was stupid and would hand out all the answers to the tests at the beginning of the semester and you showed up on the 2 test days for a open notes test.

  8. Although there are undergraduate and graduate courses of study in my field of employment, I didn’t take any of them and so couldn’t say. I majored in English lol.

  9. I work in the nonprofit sector. An academic discipline focused on “nonprofit management” was basically created out of whole cloth within the past couple decades, and a lot of universities will gladly take your money and issue you a certificate or masters degree or whatever in “nonprofit management.” I have worked with interns from our local university and I have been really deeply disappointed in how this program is structured and managed. I am not such an impressive person but I just took an entry level job when I finished my English degree and learned skills on the job and worked my way up to a good position in the field.

    I honestly worry that in another decade it will be impossible to get an entry level 35K-a-year job as a fundraising assistant or program coordinator unless you have a masters degree in nonprofit management, and it doesn’t even matter what field within the nonprofit sector (e.g. the arts, social services, the environment) you are interested in.

    I appreciate that several people are taking a stand in these comments for the liberal arts ideal of a well rounded education, but that’s rather naive. An awful lot of people do, in fact, attend college to get vocational or job training, and a lot of colleges and universities are happy to create new degrees in fermentation science or theme park technology to “serve” (i.e. take money from) those students.

  10. I have a BA in secondary ed and a BA in history. The ed degree taught me that education theory is bullshit because our education system is absolutely FUBAR. My history degree was more or less to add an endorsement to my ed degree. I honestly wish I would’ve left the ed behind and spent the effort on turning polisci from a minor to my proper second major. Oh well, live and learn I guess.

    I don’t teach anymore but I do work in higher ed so I’m using my degree *I guess*

  11. >Do you feel that some % of your university/college courses were redundant and were placed in your study plan just to make it “beefier” and stretch it for 4 full years?

    No, I don’t think so. I majored in biochem and I found all my classes to be valuable- both my major courses as well as my Gen Ed requirements.

    The US approach towards higher education is to treat it as more of an ideas incubator than a jobs training program. Having a lot of diverse knowledge both helps you think more creatively and independently and also puts you in touch with people very different from yourself, which broadens your horizons and creates cross-functional synergy.

    I think this approach does a great job of spurring entrepreneurship, as well as making our workforce very adaptable, which makes our economy more resilient. Less than half of Americans end up with a career that’s directly relevant to their field of study.

    My major was in biochemistry, but if I hadn’t also taken writing, international relations, Spanish, and systems engineering courses, I may not have made the transition to international marketing/product management so soon (within 5 years after graduation). I might still just be working in a lab somewhere.

  12. Personally I enjoyed or at least got something out of every single class I took, pretty much. Whether it was directly related to my major or not.

    Many of those things have been useful professionally, not necessarily directly doing my job but giving me transferable skills and just interesting things to talk about. You never know what kinds of things will become useful or give you a connection.

    I am a software engineer. I’m a competent programmer but I have 10000% gotten job offers over equal or better programmers due to having interesting personal conversations with hiring managers about hobbies and interests that were in part supported by those additional classes. Crossover interests also enabled multi-departmental projects that also lead to potential job leads (I didn’t end up taking the job, but because I had a background in both chemistry and computer science my CS professor whose brother worked as a director-level chemist at a major pharmaceutical company personally passed me job postings for computational biochemistry jobs, for example.)

    Edit: also, common “useless” core classes like public speaking were also very useful to me actually. I’ll never get up on stage and give a big speech for anything, but I’ve definitely utilized some of those techniques with client and team meetings, for example. As someone who’s naturally a bit socially awkward and not very charismatic (look the comp sci stereotypes might be a little bit true, lol), I did find it useful to be explicitly taught how to organize and convey information for a group, etc.

  13. kinda torn on this, on one hand i like that colleges encourage students to explore a wide range of subjects and think critically, on the other hand, i empathize with students paying tens of thousands of dollars to take classes that they’ll never use in their actual job

  14. I like that I got a liberal arts education. My degree in biochem was great. When I realized I wanted to be a lawyer I was happy I had the right background for it.

    The number of fellow students that went on to be PhDs in bio fields also proved it was a good education for them too.

  15. You can get a degree in physics or biology or chemistry and go into my field, but you can also get a degree specifically in my specialty, and it’s a bit of a joke. Yes, they have to work to make it a degree.

  16. I went to an engineering university that’s notorious for a very technical education with little liberal arts and even with that I received a broader education than the curriculum I see in other countries. The curriculum and educational outcomes of American universities is one of the country’s strengths; it’s the cost that is a major issue.

  17. Honestly, no. I loved my undergrad program at a liberal arts university. All of my science classes (I was a biochem major) helped me in my research career and PhD, and my exposure to literature/language arts and other subjects is helping me now in my second career. My other liberal and fine arts classes provided decompression, gave me a different perspective on life, and helped me hone my musical skills (which I still use as a hobby more than 20 years later).

  19. Well, I wish there had been courses about community organizing, fundraising/stewardship, and trauma-informed care.

  20. I don’t feel like the courses were added specifically to stretch out the degree, but I do wish that there was an option to get college level vocational training that an employer will accept as equivalent to a bachelor’s degree without needing to do the general education classes.

    My field (software engineering) requires a degree to get your foot in the door, but I had absolutely zero interest in all of the extra classes I needed to take like marketing, economics, geology, art history, etc. and it showed in my grades. I was paying my own way so I crammed my 4 year degree into 3 years to save money, but it would have been nice to shave off another 1.5 years of tuition, room, and board by skipping the gen ed courses. I still would have taken the same number of useful courses but it would have been much cheaper and would have put me into the workforce much faster.

  21. Yeah, for the most part. What people fail to understand is that it’s not training you for a specific job. For that you need to know what you want to do. And unless you’re taking certain majors or have a vision of what you want to do whatever you do isn’t going to help you. College didn’t help me with my current job outside of a couple classes. But that’s also because the job I have I didn’t even know existed until I got it, and wasn’t an interest while in college. Now to say that jobs don’t expose you to all the careers (or enough) within a field might be fair, but I guess that depends on the field

  22. No. The average curriculum in my field is written to make students pass a USCG exam. Those exams are not really good representations if the knowledge necessary for the work.

  23. Gen Eds are solely a way for the college to make more money by adding extra years of tuition. 90% of college students just take the ones with the least homework and learn nothing.

  24. I think it’s bullshit they way they set up higher ed

    If I’m paying the tuition I should be able to just take what’s needed relevant to my major

  25. A lot of gen eds are just helping you learn how to research. That is honestly very helpful when you’re working. I’m able to google how to use a certain software or what excel formula would work for this scenario. Being exposed to a variety of classes that weren’t directly related to my major does help me solve problems.

    College courses are not redundant. Before you sign up for a course there is a blurb online about what you’re expected to learn. You can read that description and choose classes that don’t overlap too much. They usually build off of each other. I don’t think I ever took two classes that taught the same information. There may be some repetitive information in the first 1-2 weeks where they’re building a foundation, but the entire course isn’t repetitive.

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