Some San Jose State alumni are questioning the value of general education (G.E.) courses, saying they aren’t very useful to their career paths given how much they cost.
Isaiah McNair-Wilson, a 2017 alumnus with a business marketing bachelor's degree, said that while he had positive experiences with his G.E. courses, he hasn’t benefited from them since he graduated.
“A lot of G.E. classes are pretty useless and not in the sense that it’s bad to be educated,” McNair-Wilson said over Zoom. “Personally I don’t think I disliked any of my G.E. classes, even though I think they were low-key useless.”
McNair-Wilson said the only G.E. course he felt provided skills applicable to his current job as a marketing and program lead at Moveable Co., a company that provides services varying from marketing and retail to food and music, was an honors humanities class.
He said that class touched on topics such as race, politics, war, and environmentalism. This provided him with critical thinking skills and the ability to encounter a problem and have a unique conversation about it, which he deemed applicable to his career.
According to the SJSU website, the Humanities Honors and Advanced Honors programs are meant to broaden students’ knowledge across different disciplines.
Students must take G.E. courses early in their college careers before enrolling in courses related to their majors.
“G.E. is designed to complement students' majors and help students gain perspectives, skills and knowledge to be lifelong learners,” Thalia Anagnos, vice provost of undergraduate education said in an email. “G.E. is designed to help us understand ourselves and the world we live in a social, cultural, moral and physical context.”
Students must take 39 units of general education courses ranging from lower to upper-division classes. Lower-division requirements include areas of English language communication and critical thinking and scientific inquiry and quantitative reasoning. Other categories include arts and letters and social sciences and human understanding and development, according to the G.E. catalog on the SJSU website.
The website also states that students can take upper-division requirements that pertain to their major once lower-division G.E. classes are completed and a satisfactory Writing Skills Test score is achieved.
Alyssa Wall, a 2017 alumna with a child and adolescent development bachelor’s degree, said the value of G.E. courses depends on whether or not students know the career they want to pursue.
“It can feel like a waste of time for some people if they know what they’re trying to study and are ready to go,” Wall said over Zoom. “But for me it was really helpful as a first generation [college student] to pick up that extra knowledge and figure out exactly what I wanted to do.”
Wall currently works at Braven, a nonprofit education company, and said she still uses notable skills from her G.E. courses such as public speaking and psychology, which she said has furthered her understanding of how to work with people.
Anagnos said employers value skills students obtain in their G.E. courses because it helps them understand their professions in the context of the world.
However, Wall said the price of tuition makes students question whether going to university is worth it because of the cost of G.E. courses, which may not always be relevant to each students’ major.
In the 2019-20 academic year, the average cost of tuition and fees for in-state students at SJSU was around $7,852 while the average price at a local community college like De Anza College was $1,561 according to College Factual, a website with information to help students pick a college.
“I was a college advisor with San Jose State students and with my students, I started to urge them to choose community college paths,” Wall said. “I was working with students that were like me, coming from low-income backgrounds.”
Wall said making G.E. courses free would improve the college experience. McNair-Wilson agreed with this sentiment, saying G.E. courses would feel more necessary if college was inexpensive, free or if there was a choice involved.
“People have an immediate need to get a degree because they have an immediate need to get a job. G.E. [classes] should be optional,” McNair-Wilson said. “Forcing people to take these G.E. [classes] when they don’t have the luxury or the time to find themselves and figure things out, I don’t think that’s cool.”
