General Education
The requirement of general education improves a student’s common knowledge and enforces doing more than the bare minimum to obtain one’s dream career. Despite many surveys proving the importance of the core courses, many people do not believe education should be broad based in liberal arts. Not only will the liberal arts courses positively affect someone in the workplace, but also make him or her a more educated person to impact society. These courses expand the range of opportunities a person has, since the specifics learned for any major could change within the next few years. An employer may look for someone who is knowledgeable in a specific area, but has a background of another. With the background of a liberal arts education, a person will seem more appealing to an employer because of the demand of adaptability. What are known now as the “core courses” or general studies used to be known as a "liberal education"; the range of subjects studied, from basics in reading, writing, math, speech and different branches of science. The goal is not just to produce someone with knowledge in a particular subject area, but to make one an overall educated person who has studied history and literature and science and psychology, all of which help a person to have broader knowledge of the world that surrounds him or her. General Ed became a way to get students to try different things and learn a broad variety of topics. In many European and Asian universities, students only take courses pertaining to their major. They then come to a university in the United States to complete graduate studies; the research papers and what most people would consider “easy” assignments, have foreign exchange students in a daze (Black Duesterhaus 923). If a student is in a engineering, technical, performing arts or scientific major, general education classes are important because they give you the opportunity to write, which may be seen very rarely in your major. Regardless of your