College is the place where you realize just how hard it is to manage your time. You have to balance school and social interaction with the responsibility of living on your own and being in charge of your own schedule. Many students even have jobs or extracurriculars that either help them pay for school or advance in their careers.
However, the fact that ASU students are wasting their time and money showing up for general education classes that don't have anything to do with their major is absurd.
At ASU, you're required to complete general studies courses in literacy and critical inquiry, math, statistics, humanities, social and behavioral sciences and natural sciences. I understand that we need a basic knowledge of all of these subjects to be educated, functioning members of society, but the fact that students waste hours every day going to these classes only to learn more from the assigned homework doesn't make any sense.
Further still, a large majority of math classes require you to complete homework and coursework almost entirely online. So why not expedite the process and make the entire class online?
I'm sure Downtown students know what I'm talking about when I say the walk to the Mercado building is the bane of my existence. Students shouldn't have to trek to their classes only to complete a useless worksheet that covers information they've already learned and subsequently walk back fifteen minutes later. They could be spending that time doing something productive like an extracurricular activity, or career-related learning experience, or a class that actually will matter when you graduate from ASU and have to find this thing called a J-O-B.
A proposition for Michael Crow and ASU: Make all general education classes 100 percent online. If you really want to adhere to the needs of your students and test their self motivation, make every gen-ed class self-paced and online.
The only classes students should be required to attend are ones that pertain to their majors or desired career fields. These classes are often lectures or hands-on experiences, providing students with the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in a specific career. If students didn't spend so much time going back and forth between their gen-ed classes, they would undoubtedly have time to focus on performing their very best in the classes that matter.
Let's face it: In whatever career you so choose, future employers are not going to look at your GPA, or whether or not you graduated with honors, or if you were your freshman Spanish teacher's "favorite student." They're going to be looking at your involvement in career-related extracurriculars, your past internship or job experience and your performance in classes that pertain to the job. Furthermore, if you don't have the skills necessary for the position and haven't polished your craft as best you can, you won't last long in the industry even if you do get the job.
This makes it all the more crucial that you spend more time developing yourself as a professional and building a base knowledge about your field rather than attending classes that have no real world applicability for you.
Sure, it's important to have a basic understanding of the world around you, and some gen-ed classes can be helpful to your career even if you don't think they are; for journalism majors like me, this includes foreign language and statistics. It just makes a lot more sense for your focus to be on learning how you'll use your degree, rather than just receiving it.
Reach the columnist at RClarke6@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @RClarkeASU
Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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