By Andrew J. Perrin and A.T. Panter

CHAPEL HILL (September 18, 2024) –General Education. Distribution Requirements. Such standards – required by nearly every institution of higher learning and prescribed by most accreditation bodies evoke dreary images of endless checkboxes.

Frustrated students search for courses with open seats that fit their schedules, while overworked academic advisors try to help students solve the puzzle. “Gen ed” is something to “get through,” to “get out of the way” en route to accomplishment in the major and ultimately the degree.

Gen ed shouldn’t evoke such negativity – and the fact that so many students, faculty, and administrators perceive it this way reveals an urgent need to rethink it, putting students’ intellectual and practical foundations first. Far from drudgery, a general education curriculum should express the faculty’s collective ambition for their students’ intellectual achievement. It should be a solid foundation for students to progress through their undergraduate studies, graduating as lifelong learners and societal contributors.

Designing outstanding general education demands a shift in the way many faculty, students, and administrators think: primarily about individual disciplines (e.g., history, biology, sociology, English). Faculty are used to university funding models that reward departments with higher student enrollments, so gen ed can become an opportunity for less-visible departments to attract potential majors or earn scarce “butts-in-seats” dollars.

It’s not surprising, then, that sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa (2011) found that student enthusiasm for college plummets during their first semester: often a time that finds many students in those disciplinary introductions without an intellectual guide or the space to explore.

Even our best-prepared students cannot grasp the breadth of the opportunities they might encounter in college; they will have encountered only a fraction of the disciplines and approaches available. And for students who are enrolled at highly selective institutions, they’ve just been through four or more years teaching them that they should be laser-focused on a singular professional goal. The focus that probably got them into college won’t serve them very well in getting the most out of that college.

Instead of asking students to assemble haphazard collections of introductory classes, think of gen ed as a systematic effort to push students beyond what they already know, broadening their horizons while strengthening the capacities most important for them, regardless of their selected major(s) or minor. What will allow each student, having earned their degree, to go forth in the world, shining reflected light back on the institution and inspiring next generations?

We led a committed team of faculty members, instructional design experts, and student success professionals in the process of designing IDEAs in Action, the new general education curriculum implemented at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The process engaged hundreds of faculty members and UNC stakeholders and involved multiple developmental phases over six years of listening, designing, piloting, and implementing.

The new curriculum was approved by the Faculty Council in 2019 and first implemented in fall 2022 after a COVID-related delay. Since leaving Chapel Hill, one of us has been involved in the CUE2 (Second Committee on Undergraduate Education) at Johns Hopkins and has worked with several other institutions of various sizes and types to imagine what general education can be. The other of us worked with a talented lead to oversee IDEAs in Action’s implementation and has seen first-hand the value of a coherent, ambitious gen ed curriculum.

Among the hallmarks of IDEAs in Action are: (1) A more structured first year of college designed to foster enthusiasm and commitment while introducing students to intellectual inquiry through seminars, interdisciplinary learning, and a course about thriving in college; (2) course requirements based on capacities students learn in class (think collaboration, communication, and analysis of evidence, among others), not the departments they learn them in; and (3) high impact educational experiences for all graduates.

IDEAs in Action seeks to foster students’ capacities to be professionally successful, civically engaged, open-minded, and intellectually curious. By ensuring that all students – not just the savvy ones – develop these capacities, the curriculum opens the space for students to choose majors based on their talents and passions, because they can be confident that gen ed has given them the foundation for success.

We recognize that higher education in the U.S. is gloriously heterogeneous, so students of one institution may need something very different from those at another. Curricula should be oriented to the match between the institutional strengths and ambitions and graduates’ long-term academic needs for that institution. Importantly, students’ needs are not necessarily the same thing as what students want. Our students live in an age of short time horizons and shorter attention spans. Many are nervous about exploring beyond their primary field or changing goals based on new experiences.

So what do most students need from a general education curriculum? It should certainly prepare students to be successful in the workplace – not just in jobs we can anticipate will be there for the few years after college, but in careers that will span a half-century or more in fields that may not even exist as today’s students graduate. More important, students need to become responsible, committed citizens and to build intellectual habits of mind to support them and their families and communities – again, with a time horizon of 50 years or more.

That’s a tall order.

Happily, it turns out that the capacities for each of the needs are similar. IDEAs in Action encourages students to ask big questions, gathering and seeking evidence to address those questions with open minds, faithfully examining that evidence, reaching solid conclusions and making good judgments even – and especially – under uncertainty, and acting responsibly and effectively on those judgments. These capacities will be a solid foundation for work, citizenship, and life.

No singular discipline or department holds the key to that goal; students should learn it through a mix of different courses, each bringing its own questions, ideas, and foundations. So rather than focusing on how faculty lives are organized currently in institutions in the U.S. (departments and disciplines), we organized requirements in terms of intellectual excitement and processes of inquiry. And we put in place a review process to make sure every gen ed course is high quality, with sustained intellectual work and ample opportunity for communication and collaboration.

One of the more audacious and difficult to implement aspects of IDEAs in Action is a first year requirement for a large, interdisciplinary “Ideas, Information, and Inquiry” (“Triple I”) course. The Triple-I program was motivated by a council of department chairs who proposed that interdisciplinary teaching should be a priority alongside interdisciplinary research. Teams of faculty from three different disciplines teach distinct approaches to a common area: think “Death and Dying,” “Fake News, Real Science,” or “Ethics, Economics, and Public Policy.”

Because a new curriculum means a huge investment of time, effort, input, and money, the new curriculum must be created with continuous assessment, review, and revision in mind so improvements can be made instead of requiring a complete redesign. Years before the new curriculum was implemented, we asked ourselves: how will we know that the elements of the curriculum are making a difference? We built in processes for reviewing and changing curricular elements without having to reconsider the whole framework.

Such revisions need to be based on systematic evidence: what’s working? What’s not? What’s missing? What are key sticking points for students and faculty? Documenting what we hope students will learn and then assessing whether they are doing so will provide invaluable evidence for adjustments over time.

Moreover, a flexible process can help cope with other forces that can affect gen ed curricula outside of accepted practices. For example, the University of North Carolina’s Board of Governors created a new, very specific American Democracy requirement – with little faculty input. The requirement’s incorporation into IDEAs in Action will involve substantial faculty input and design to ensure it is similarly high-quality and intellectually generative to the rest of the gen ed curriculum.

Gen ed doesn’t deserve the bad rap it gets. How a college organizes its general education is among the most important academic statements of values and quality: a practical expression of its ambition for its students’ lives.

Designing that curriculum therefore deserves time, care, attention, articulation, and enthusiasm so students can focus on developing an open-minded, respectful, evidence-based approach to the world and be prepared for passionate learning for a lifetime.

Andrew Perrin is the SNF-Agora Institute Professor and Chair of Sociology, Krieger School of Arts & Sciences, Johns Hopkins University. A.T. Panter is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.