Eliminating the Breadth Requirement is Wrongheaded

In many American colleges and universities, undergraduates are required to take courses in a diverse set of areas. These depth requirements mean that they even if they are majoring in the humanities, they may be required to take, not just a single science course, but several courses. Some curricula may even specify that several of these courses have to be at a level higher than a specified minimum.

Recently, due to vociferous demands from students and their parents some colleges have been moving away from these breadth requirements. The demand for drastic reduction or elimination of the these requirement is premised on the students’ expectation that this will result in better job prospects since they will be able to then take courses with material more relevant to their future jobs. This argument assumes that there is a connection between the kind of courses that the students take and their job prospects; that the employers are more attracted to students who have a deep specialization in a narrow field, than a broad base of good academic work. In addition, the underlying assumption is that the function of a university is to make people into readily employable corporate widgets. I will argue that both of these assumptions are mistaken.

It is clear that the American economy, not unlike the economies of most other developed countries, is going through a transformation. We now value flexibility and creativity above narrow expertise and discipline. The most valued employees in the work places of this new economy are not ones that are narrowly focused, but ones that have a broad base that allows them not only be flexible in the kind of work that they can do, but also enables them to be creative in that special way that can only come from combining the knowledge that they have gleaned from diverse disciplines to create a new synthesis. If this is indeed true, and this is the kind of employee many employers in this new economy are looking for, it is possible that if colleges and universities were to allow students to be more specialized, their job prospects would suffer instead of improving.

Beyond whether or not taking these extra courses is hurting the job prospects of these students, I wonder what the students who are agitating fro elimination of breadth requirements imagine the purpose of an undergraduate education is. Historically, universities have tried not to see themselves as only being diploma mills, factories that produce workers, but rather places which provide the education that allows us to live our lives more fully: a true education allows us to be more human, to be more ourselves. And this essential purpose, surely, is not served if our courses are only narrowly focused on the area where we see immediate pecuniary advantage. True that few people ever get a job by just studying Plato and Aristotle, but would we even know what our jobs and lives mean if we never ponder the issues that they help us contemplate.