The WICHE Interstate Passport Initiative, launched in October 2011, is a pilot project that addresses interstate student transfer. When students transfer from one postsecondary institution to another--both within and out of state--they may be required to repeat courses, which can add to the time and cost of completing their education. Although…

Mark Van Doren, the noted literary scholar, once remarked, "The college is meaningless without a curriculum, but it is more so when it has one that is meaningless." Many current critics of undergraduate curricula in America assent to the crucial need for programmatic renewal in our colleges and universities. They bemoan the cookie-cutter…

A college education has never been so necessary, or so expensive. It is incumbent upon us, the educators, to do it the best we can. The products of our work are not the buildings on our campuses but our students who go out into this complicated and exciting world to serve as its leaders, its citizens, and its workers. The Bates College general…

At North Carolina State University, inquiry-guided learning offered a compelling framework for integrating the undergraduate curriculum across general education and the major. Rather than adopting a definition of inquiry-guided learning as a prescribed set of approaches, participating faculty and staff members agreed on four overarching intended…

Amidst a policy context that is ardently promoting participation in world politics, trade, and cultural exchange, institutions of higher education are increasingly committing their campuses to preparing students for professional and civic lives in a globalized world. Yet among the many approaches taken by institutions to internationalize their…

Potential students hoping to gauge the quality of courses at Portland State University might be forgiven for feeling confused. On the one hand, the University Studies program, which uses interdisciplinary seminars during the first two years to develop students' core skills, has been widely praised and emulated. The Council for Higher Education…

Technology has permeated almost every aspect of society. With this popularity of technology, information has become more accessible than ever. Because society has become inundated with information, it is more important than ever to prepare citizens to be educated consumers of information. Perhaps the community college, whose mission has always…

The debate over the best delivery of general education, whether through a canon of Great Books, a core curriculum of specific courses and course sequences, or a distribution requirement of course types providing for greater student choice, has existed for generations. Today, the debate plays out in practice across the top-rated colleges and…

Are the humanities relevant enough to the average undergraduate to be included as a required part of a general education program? The University of Idaho (UI) is currently ten years into the challenge of implementing a cross-disciplinary, university-wide general education program--the UI Core--that has the attention, if not always the support, of…

Baxter Magolda's Learning Partnerships model was used to create a program designed to foster student epistemological development. To assess its effectiveness, the Measure of Epistemological Reflection was administered to the experimental cohort and a comparable group in the traditional general education program. Results indicate that the model…

If colleges and universities are to live up to their responsibility to educate tomorrow's decision makers, they must develop a different, less convenient, curriculum: one that addresses real-world issues. Granted, most universities already have courses dealing with some of these issues; however, these courses often are buried within majors and…

When the University of North Dakota began working to improve general education, two concerns were recognized. The first issue, which faculty and administrators across campus found immediately engaging, was how to change general education so that it would be a better program, more likely to yield clear student learning benefits. A second concern,…

The Great Books hold a special place in scholarly and academic lore in America. Study of the Great Books and liberal education in general were the foundation of a college education since the colonial times, but yielded to electives and other academic trends during the early portion of the twentieth century. By the 1930s, several men sought to…

The crisis in higher education is about more than money. It is about what one has been paying for, paying for dearly. The public, even in these hard times, supports higher education with its tax dollars. And families make huge sacrifices to send their sons and daughters to college. They deserve in return higher education that provides real…

By highlighting the affinities between the good society and the general education curriculum, liberal arts faculty can better prepare students to meet the needs of the world. Optional common curricula can help socialize students into a domain crucial to flourishing communities, the voluntary pursuit of collective aspirations within civil society.