Possible New Structure for General Education

(12/31/97)

(Revised 2/9/98)

This proposed new structure for GE lowers the total number of credit hours from 57 to 56 and introduces several changes to the current system:

1. The number of required courses is reduced from 17 to 14, which positions us better for a possible semester conversion and provides some greater scheduling efficiency for students.
2. A "college component" class allows for greater flexibility to meet curricular needs of colleges and individual needs of their students. Each college develops one course to satisfy GE requirements, so the number of required GE courses is functionally reduced from 17 to 13 (plus one selected by the college) and the hours are reduced from 57 to 52 (plus 4 hours for the course named by the individual college).
3. A "student component" allows for greater flexibility to accommodate interests and needs of individual students.
4. All university-wide GE courses will be 4 credit hours, which will allow first-year students to enroll full-time with any three GE classes.
5. A broader range of classes can count for GE credit, which will make it possible to reduce reliance on very large lectures by adding new smaller class alternatives.
6. Diversity is introduced to the GE curriculum in a structured and meaningful way.
7. While preserving the current broad GE-wide goals, the new structure engenders more specific objectives and learning outcomes to be applied to each GE requirement.

WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM--

Changes made to GE are intended to preserve the Writing Across the Curriculum Program requirement that students take four writing intensive GE classes. The new structure need not change the writing intensive classes in the sciences. However, not all students will take EC 200 and SOC 200. All Great Books classes can remain WI, however, and it should also be possible to make the non-western and college component classes writing intensive as well. In this way, students should be able to schedule at least 4 WI classes with relative ease.