Perspective: At universities, new sets of values bring new sets of requirements

What college students need to learn is constantly changing, and universities are working to keep up with the times.

Yale University instated changes to its distribution requirements for the class of 2009 and now requires students to venture abroad.

Harvard University, for its part, recently released a proposal to revamp its own curriculum.

And Penn, too, jumped on this bandwagon last year, instituting changes in its General Requirement that are just beginning to make a dent on the lives of students, advisors and faculty members.

But this sort of change is nothing new.

"When I look at what Penn has done, it seems to me to be part of a larger national trend," said Carol Schneider, the president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

She explained that, since the '80s, colleges have been going through waves of curriculum reforms, with greater emphases on a broad-based curriculum.

And the new College General Curriculum, with its interdisciplinary and cross cultural analysis requirements marks a step toward the broad-based foundation these schools are aiming for.

The conception of the Pilot Curriculum about eight years ago marked the beginning of the move toward a new College curriculum.

After two years of planning, 200 members of the incoming Class of 2004 served as the program's first guinea pigs, taking four specially designed interdisciplinary courses instead of General Requirement. This option was offered to each of the next four classes.

"It was like a controlled experiment," College of Arts and Sciences Dean Dennis DeTurck said.

By observing a group of students who were not bound by the General Requirement Curriculum, faculty were able to see how students functioned without the standard confines.

DeTurck said that, in general, Pilot and General Requirement students tended to make similar course and degree choices, as well as pursue similar paths after graduation.

With these findings in mind, in the fall of 2004, the College office called the faculty together for forums to discuss the possibility of changing the General Requirement curriculum.

There was the "sense that the old curriculum had been around for 15 to 17 years and hadn't been looked at very carefully," said Director of Academic Affairs Kent Peterman.

He explained that students had difficulties understanding the rules, and that lists of sector courses had grown too long.

After a number of faculty and student forums, and several drafts, the General Requirement Curriculum was born: At the end of the Spring 2005 semester, the SAS faculty voted unanimously - with a few amendments - to adopt the SAS Committee on Undergraduate Education's proposal.

And though it is a product of much planning and debate, the new curriculum is not a radical change, Peterman said.

It "is a pretty conservative modification of the old curriculum," he added.

DeTurck explained that the College retained five of the sector requirements from the old General Requirement. Distribution requirements were shed, but the language, writing, formal reasoning and analysis and quantitative data analysis sectors remained.

The two new interdisciplinary sectors - humanities and social science and humanities and natural science and math - can be fulfilled by an additional course from one of the first five sectors or another course specified for the sector, he said.

DeTurck added that there will be a new Advanced Placement test policy: With the exception of the language requirement, AP tests will no longer fulfill sector requirements.

"Faculty were clear they didn't want to allow students to use APs - a high school educational experience - to place out of general education requirements," Peterman said.

Another innovation of the new General Requirement curriculum was its sense of clarity; lists of what counts for each sector will be shortened to about 50 courses per sector, DeTurck said.

And though the new curriculum is simpler than its predecessor, it is still a bit more complicated than creators had hoped.

Peterman said that they had hoped for fewer requirements than what resulted.

"It's not as simple as I was hoping it would come out," DeTurck said.

Even though complexity still remains with the new curriculum, Tighe said that the transition of freshmen into the curriculum has been pretty smooth.

"I haven't heard anything that seems different from previous freshmen classes responding to [the] curriculum," she said.

And many freshmen are satisfied with the new curriculum.

"I think it's good because it's not too straining," College freshman Amanda Maizel said.

Freshman Elise Miller noted the broad range of classes to choose from for a given sector.

However, not all freshmen were as pleased.

Freshman Nick Marotta expressed frustration that only one of his major, Biochemistry, classes would count toward the requirements.

DeTurck said that curriculum anxieties are not out of the norm.

"Like any set of requirements, it's a set of constraints," he said. "There are always going to be people who find any constraints unhappy things."

But of all people dealing with this change, advisers, especially those experienced in the older curriculum, were likely the most affected, Tighe said. She added that she and her colleagues have been working with the faculty advising freshmen to adjust to the changes.

And while most departments are experiencing few effects from the changes, some had more at stake with the reform.

East Asian Languages and Civilizations undergraduate chairman Paul Goldin explained that a curriculum free of requirements could cause his department to lose potential students.

Thus, he said, he and his colleagues were "relieved" at the final product.

DeTurck added that, under the new curriculum, there haven't been any great dislocations with regard to course enrollments.

Penn is certainly not alone in its adjustments.

The trend toward a broader-based curriculum is part of a larger, national phenomenon, beginning in the 1980s, said Schneider.

"We are in . a globally engaged knowledge economy where people need more global knowledge and higher skills," she said; employers look for such skills, and universities have been tailoring their curricula to teach them.

Other schools, though with very different curricula than Penn, seem to have a such a focus.

Yale University, with its recently revamped distributional curriculum, aimed to provide a broader base of knowledge, according to Yale spokeswoman Gila Reinstein.

And in order to ensure a global focus, Reinstein said, Yale is requiring that students spend some time within their four years in another country.

There is a "real push to have our students be students of the world."

Columbia's Associate Dean of the Core Curriculum Deborah Martinsen said that Columbia's core curriculum, in which students must take a set of required classes, is meant to provide a broad education.

Different schools have different approaches to the institution of their curriculum, DeTurck explained. He said that while Penn will not mandate certain courses, there will not be a totally free curriculum, as Brown has, either.

"We're not a laissez-faire place," he said.

University President Amy Gutmann added that the Penn curriculum required finding the balance between such extremes - all choice and little structure or a lot of structure and little choice.

"I think we've got the right balance," she said.

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