The Pope Center for Higher Education Policy has come to the rescue of students at UNC-Chapel Hill who are struggling to select next fall’s “general education” courses. Today, the center is announcing its specific class recommendations, based on a survey of UNC-Chapel Hill students. These recommendations are found in the table that accompanies this article.
The Pope Center’s General Education Course Survey will guide students to courses that are challenging, intellectually involving, and where they will not be barraged by narrow political viewpoints. The aim of the survey is both to demystify the process of finding interesting general education classes and to help counter the intrusion of politics into education that has been found all too often at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Choosing which classes to take is a perennial challenge at Chapel Hill. It is particularly difficult for freshmen and sophomores, who must select “general education” requirements from more than 2000 possible choices. Such courses range from introductory economics or mathematics to classes on popular culture, music, and movies. General education requirements can be met with 51 hours of course work, 42 of which are spread over the three major categories, Foundations, Approaches, and Connections. The 2000-plus courses are an often-confusing mix of broad survey courses and classes on very narrow, specialized topics, and they are distributed across many disciplines.
Although course descriptions are available online, they are usually vague and sometimes misleading. Combined with the tremendous breadth of topics and the need to fit classes into a tight schedule, this lack of accurate and detailed information can make the task of finding good classes an arduous one indeed.
Choosing became more, not less, difficult due to changes made to the requirements in 2006. These changes subdivide the general education courses into narrow categories whose requirements must be met, and they also integrate the theme of global awareness and international citizenship into the new requirements. This creates new opportunities for faculty members to bring in their own political world-view, which is often left-leaning.
For example, there are new standards, such as the Global Issues and Experiential Education requirements, that emphasize international citizenship and downplay Western culture. These standards also include a deliberate “intensification and reaffirmation” of longstanding requirements that diminish Western civilization’s importance, and Beyond the North Atlantic and Foreign Language Enhancement requirements that will be implemented in the near future.
Here are the Pope Center’s Recommendations:
KEY: DRAM116, Perspectives in Theatre; ECON101, Introduction to Economics; ENG101, Composition and Rhetoric; ENG102, Composition and Rhetoric; ENG225, Shakespeare; HIST127, American History to 1865; PHIL110, Introduction to the Great Works; POLI100, Introduction to U.S. Government; PSYC101, General Psychology.
The survey is adapted from a questionnaire conducted by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. In addition to asking whether the faculty member was unbiased and open to student viewpoints, questions on the survey also address academic rigor, the professor’s availability during office hours, and whether the course materials are interesting.
Students taking the survey evaluated both the content of each course and the professors who taught them. For some large survey courses—Introduction to American Government, in particular—there were many responses about each professor. For classes with smaller sections, the response volume was lower, making it more difficult to choose definitively the best course and professor in each discipline.
The recommended courses are those that students found both interesting and challenging, with professors who were unbiased and open-minded.
Without a survey like this one, students undoubtedly flounder. Simply relying on Carolina’s requirements for choosing classes could lead to wildly disparate outcomes. Dedicated, focused students who have learned the ropes of the registration process can tailor their courses to their interests and develop an excellent footing on which to base their major studies. Unprepared or uncertain students may spend excessive class hours taking disjointed, unhelpful courses that don’t add up to a meaningful education—or rely on friends’ suggestions of where to get “easy As.”
Furthermore, students who remain in the College of Arts and Sciences—instead of transferring to the business, journalism, education or information science schools—have even more complex choices to make. They must take an additional nine hours of coursework to fulfill junior- and senior-level Supplemental Education requirements. These hours, which make up part of the total 51 hours of required general education courses, can be fulfilled through Interdisciplinary Cluster Programs or by taking three non-introductory courses, one in each of the three divisions of the College of Arts and Sciences outside the student’s primary major.
More information about the UNC-CH General Education Course Survey can be found here. We look forward to discovering more excellent courses at Chapel Hill as our survey continues.
Jenna Ashley Robinson is the campus outreach coordinator of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh.