General Education Classes Should Not Be Required

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Within recent decades, college has become a more easily available path than it has been for the past generations. In a current news release, The Bureau of Labor Statistics stated that, “Of the 2.9 million youth age 16 to 24 who graduated from high school between January and October 2014, about 68.4 percent were enrolled in college in October” (BLS Economic News Release from April 2015). When a student graduates high school, most of them intend to continue on to college. They have the idea that, while there, they can break away from all the general classes and just focus on what they want to learn. However, for almost all students, they find that this is not the reality. Just like high school, they find that they have to take approximately two years in general studies in order to attend and graduate with the major of their choice. General education classes should not be required because a majority of the information learned has already been covered in past years. Most of the courses do not benefit a student 's major, and the total amount of required hours for these classes can become a big waste of time and money.
My first reason why general education classes should not be required in college is because the topics that they are learning have already been taught in high school. In an article by Jessica Williams, she summarizes it by saying, “We spend 13 years in ‘general education’ courses. Why are we wasting time rehashing what we already know we aren’t interested in when we could be spending that time adding to our resumes” (Williams). For a majority of students, if they take a class where they have already learned the material or even have a grasp on the subject, most likely, they will become bored and uninterested in their sch...

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...ts would be taking classes that they find interesting and are more likely to put more effort into them because of this.
In conclusion, college is a huge milestone in a person 's life. What they do with their time and money during those years can be crucial to what they get out of it. General education classes should not be a requirement because they have already been taught a majority of the curriculum in high school, some of the classes can have nothing to do with your major, and it can be a waste of money by spending it on classes that they are not interested in. By making it a requirement to take general classes, you are taking away time that they could be devoting to their interests and major. College should be a time where you focus on learning what you are gonna do for the rest of your life, not trying to learn every possible subject that a school can offer.

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