Group Calls for “Serious Look” at Ending Four-Year College Requirements
Last week the “Americans for Limited Government” (ALG), a non-partisan public interest group, called for a “serious look” at saving taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars by “eliminat[ing] most of today’s college course electives and mov[ing] toward full two-year degrees.”
The call came in the lead article of ALG’s flagship publication, The Daily Editorialist. The Editorialist is sent each morning to newspaper editors nationwide.
“It is time,” Daily Editorialist publisher Bill Wilson wrote, “that today’s colleges and universities begin reevaluating what knowledge and technical skills are demanded of individuals by real world institutions, and adjust their curricula accordingly—as well as their required credit units.
“Years ago, there was no ‘worldwide web’ or widespread mass media the way there is today With the dawn of the Information Age, technologies such as cable TV and the internet have given the average young person today more information at the click of a mouse or the changing of a channel than Albert Einstein ever had access to in all his scholarly years.”
The Editorialist commentary cited a number of elective courses taken from “a quick glance at standard course catalogues” to substantiate its claim that “it’s time to take a serious look at the cost – and effectiveness of today’s university culture.”
Among the courses cited was a University of California elective entitled “Feminist Geography”, which “studies feminist geographic theory and methods”. Another course cited was “The Art Walking”, a course offered at Centre College in Kentucky that focuses on “the ancient habits of walking, hiking and pilgrimage.” ALG also took issue with the course “Daytime Serials: Family and Social Roles”, offered at the University of Wisconsin, which “analyzes themes and characters that populate television's daytime serials.”
ALG cited California’s UCLA as indicative of colleges where costly – and what the organization considers unnecessary – electives could be eliminated in order to save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Says the Editorialist article:
“According to UCLA’s Undergraduate Course Catalog, students must take total of 180 credit hours, 45 of which must be from their field of study, in order to graduate. If a student at UCLA takes an average of 15 credits a trimester (four courses) it would take them four years to graduate, assuming they only took classes in 3 trimesters per academic year.
“Now, at $23,547 per year, on average—including room, board, tuition and fees— that comes out to $94,188. Consider this: If a student were only required to take courses pertinent to their field of study- sorry, but that means no Feminist Geography- it would only take them half as long to graduate and only cost $5,886 a year—a 75 percent savings.
And the savings don’t end there in this example. According to UCLA’s campus paper The Daily Bruin, students at UCLA only pay 30 percent of the cost of education at the university- meaning the taxpayers of California subsidize the other $52,308.67 it costs to educate one student per year at UCLA. Therefore, if the above curricula reform were enacted just at UCLA alone, it would save California taxpayers on average of $244,048,660 a year”
Wilson acknowledged that some critics may consider the idea of eliminating most of today’s college electives and moving towards full two-year degrees heresy. “But,” said the ALG president, “those most likely will be tenured professors who like the four-year ride, not parents who are paying the bill and serious students who want to get on with their lives in the work-a-day world.”
Originally Published: Issue 648 - May 14, 2008
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