"It's time to prioritize what students want and need over what we want to teach"

[apl68]

Enrollment decline as climate change:

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/enrollment-decline-climate-change.

Both long-term changes, the response to which often brings to mind the old analogy of how to gradually boil a frog.

[Wahoo Redux]

As Handstedt, Reed, and some commenters on this thread point out:

• Distribution requirements often are a repeat what was already studied in high school.
• The courses often don't transfer because every institution has its own "special" gen ed requirements (designed to force in-house course enrollments).
• The above results in higher costs to students because of lengthened time to degree (underlying purpose: more tuition revenue for the university).
• Courses are primarily staffed by the low-paid adjunct army.
• Curricular sequencing sends the message "the faster you get your gen ed requirements out of the way, the more quickly you can enroll in the important courses you are interested in."
• Lack of in-depth study and hence knowledge of any of the disciplines that populate the distribution requirements.

Para's edit: FTFY.

I'm not sure why restudying something in college that one studied in high school is necessarily a bad thing.  H.S. as a similar distribution of classes as college.  It simply stands that one will study some form history, English, math, a science or two in H.S., and probably music or the fine arts, and then you study these same subjects in college because we've divided disciplines in the manner, so there is almost certainly going to be some duplication.  The difference, generally speaking, is that the college classes will be far more thorough and require a higher level of work.  Do we assume that studying a subject in H.S. means we have mastered the subject matter and need not study it further?  And sometimes we study something absolutely brand new in college in gen ed requirements----happened to me.

Many gen eds DO transfer.

We could fix the adjunct employment problem.

Do we really expect "in-depth" knowledge?----could we say that "exposure" is a worthwhile goal for people like me whose lack of "in-depth" knowledge has not hindered my appreciation of some of the things I've been exposed to through education.

And gen ed breadth has been a convention for many generations now; has it always been to generate revenue and keep departments alive?

Just because "Handstedt, Reed, and some commenters on this thread point" something out does not necessarily mean it is true.

We've entered a phase in which we simply look for reasons to tear down our institutions instead of working to help them evolve.