Looking beyond Career Skills: What Every University and College Student Needs to Learn

By: Daniel K. Williams

Welcome to another series of The Raised Hand. For the academic year we will publish essays answering the question: What does every university and college student need to learn? Current disagreements about what is essential in a college education reflect deeper fractures in the modern university about mission, values, and purpose. In light of this reality we seek to explore the essential features of education that should remain universal, foundational, and, in a sense, non-negotiable in today’s college and university curricula. Join us in reading and commenting, and invite others to think along with our authors and fellow readers as we seek to raise questions about higher education for the common good.

Looking beyond Career Skills: What Every University and College Student Needs to Learn

Daniel K. Williams teaches American history at Ashland University and is the author of numerous books including The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship.

Five years ago, I began a multi-year stint on a general education revision committee at the state university where I was teaching at the time. Like other state universities in Georgia, our institution required students to take general education requirements that comprised more than one-third of the credits required to earn a four-year degree.

Although the core had changed over the decades, the idea of a set of generally applicable skills and principles that all students (regardless of major) had to master before graduation dated back to the beginning of the institution. In fact, the concept dates back to the beginning of higher education in America, when colleges required all students to read a set of common books and master a common body of knowledge.

But as the conversations on the general education committee revealed, it was hard to get academics of the 21^st century to agree on exactly what all college students should learn. In contrast to the general education requirements of most 19^th-century American colleges, most of the general education curriculum at this state university consisted not so much of specific course requirements but rather of broad categories of knowledge, such as “social sciences” or “science.” Whether a student fulfilled their science requirement by taking a course in “Weather and Climate” or in organic chemistry made no difference to the university. Likewise, whether a student took psychology or economics for their social science requirement, or whether a student selected introductory Spanish or British literature to fulfill their humanities core, made no difference to the university, either. As long as students took courses in a variety of different areas and picked up skills and knowledge from a range of academic disciplines, the university administrators were satisfied that they would graduate as well-rounded, educated people who were prepared for the next stage of their lives and careers. Presumably, somewhere along the way they would learn something about the scientific method and something about how social scientists studied society, but exactly how they got to that point was up to the individual student and their academic advisor.

By the time that we reexamined our university’s general education requirements, even this highly flexible vestige of the longstanding idea that there were certain skills and areas of knowledge that all college students needed to learn was being challenged by university administrators. The vice chancellor of the state university system wanted to streamline the core and reduce it by at least 25 percent. Only a few common areas of knowledge – such as English composition, math, computer skills, and American history and government – would be required.

Some institutions have gone further in dismantling the core. At Brown University, where I studied for my Ph.D., undergraduate students have had no general education requirements in over half a century. Instead, each incoming student meets with an advisor to design their own individual curriculum.

So, the idea that there are certain things that all college students should learn would not necessarily meet with universal agreement in higher education today. For more than a century, higher education has been moving in an increasingly fragmented and individualistic direction, and these trends have accelerated in recent years. The vast majority of college students today say that they are pursuing a degree primarily to enter a career of their choice – which means that they are more likely to view their education as narrowly focused career training rather than as a broadly based preparation for life.

Yet for most of the history of American higher education – from the founding of the first American colleges in the 17^th century until at least the mid-20^th century – the idea that there were certain things that every American college student should learn in college seemed obvious to most professors and administrators. The reason that we have started to question this idea is because we have lost faith in any unifying principle of knowledge and have reduced college education to a set of individualized skills based merely on a student’s personal interest or career goals.

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, college education was framed around a common classical Greco-Roman curriculum, supplemented with instruction in theology. In the early 19^th century, American college educators revamped and modernized this curriculum, but when they did so, they consciously thought about what principles might unite all higher educational learning.

The early 19^th-century American college curriculum was framed around the idea that college education should prepare students to be not only productive citizens, but also virtuous ones. For that reason, at most early 19^th-century colleges, every student had to take a course in moral reasoning. These courses treated morality as a science that could be logically deduced, but which ultimately depended on a theistic framework. For that reason, most colleges also required that every student had to take a course in “Christian evidences,” which today we might call Christian apologetics. These courses used empirically based evaluation of historical and scientific evidence to prove the existence of a divine creator and then to determine that it was more probable than not that the Bible had a divine origin and that Christianity was a divinely founded religion based on the historically verifiable claim that Jesus had risen from the dead. Some colleges also required students to take an additional course in natural theology, which explored evidence for the existence of God from nature.

Though widely scorned after the late 19^th century, these courses in moral reasoning, natural theology, and Christian evidences gave students a framework to make sense of all of their other coursework in science, mathematics, and the humanities. History had meaning because it was part of God’s divine plan. Science pointed to the existence of God and depended on a theistic framework for its rational understanding of the universe. And one of the central goals of a college education was to prepare a student to be a moral person, with a Christian theistic framework as a guide.

In the early decades of the University of Wisconsin (this full course listing is from 1853) all seniors in their first term were required to take a course titled “Christian Evidences,” usually taught by the president of the university. Credit: University of Wisconsin—Madison archives.

When the 19^th-century college curriculum was revamped once again after the Civil War, many leading colleges dropped their required classes in natural theology and Christian evidences. Colleges that adopted the model of the German research university insisted that the purpose of a college education was not to transmit truths to students, but rather to help them cultivate a spirit of free inquiry. Yet if institutions of higher education dropped the older theistic framework, they retained the traditional emphasis on moral formation, albeit under a different name. Instead of calling it “moral philosophy,” the colleges and universities, many of them public rather than private institutions, called the new ethic “public service,” and under that name, they trained students for a life of service to their community and to the American democracy. “Princeton in the Nation’s Service” became Woodrow Wilson’s rallying cry when he was president of that university. What Wilson said about the purpose of Princeton was equally true of the other leading colleges and universities of the time.

The “usefulness” of a college education is “demonstrated by the increase of power for service” that students gained from it, Louis Franklin Snow, the registrar at Columbia University’s Teachers College, wrote in 1907. Universities such as his own therefore emphasized social sciences such as history, political science, economics, and international relations, he said, because they focused on questions that “vitally concur with the welfare of the people.” Only in so far as an academic discipline was concerned with “principles helpful to the welfare of humanity” should “any subject be admitted into the curriculum of the college in the United States.”   

This ethic diminished after World War II, when college education expanded beyond a narrow elite. The students who entered college in the late 1940s and afterwards viewed higher education as a ticket to white-collar careers and the benefits of the middle class. Specialized college majors became more important than ever, since it was the student’s choice of major (not the general education requirement) that would determine whether students would end up as a chemical engineer after graduation or would instead become a high school teacher, an accountant, or any number of other possible career choices.

Most colleges still retained a general education requirement because of their belief that students needed to learn a certain set of basic skills and principles to be good citizens, as well as intellectually curious, well-rounded people capable of carrying on erudite conversations on a variety of subjects. But many universities showed by their actions that administrators themselves did not value general education courses very much. By the beginning of the 21^st century, large state universities routinely delegated these courses to low-paid adjuncts or graduate students or scheduled them in massive lecture halls where students found it easy to get lost in a crowd. By the beginning of the 2020s, an increasing number of students were taking these classes online – where they might never have a conversation with the instructor in person – or exempting themselves from these courses through AP credit they earned in high school.

Small wonder then that some universities decided that an overhaul to their general education program was in order. But how to revise these programs was another matter.

In the end, the faculty and administrators involved in the general education revision effort that I was a part of at my former university settled on a set of common skills that all students should master in college. All students needed to learn how to write, they decided. All students needed to demonstrate proficiency in mathematical reasoning. Every student had to gain experience in critical thinking.

If the primary goal of college is to prepare students for a career, skill-based general education requirements make a lot of sense. I have no objection to these requirements. In fact, I think that there are several essential skills – writing, math, and critical thinking among them – that every college student needs to learn. I also believe that there is a lot of value in the early twentieth-century general education requirements that sought to develop a sense of civic responsibility through training in the social sciences.

But even if every college student learns how to write and think critically, and even if all of them acquire some type of civic education, there is still something missing in their formation. They might be skilled individuals, and they might even have a commitment to civic engagement, but will they have a sense of how all knowledge fits together? Will they have any sense of an objective basis for morality? Will they have the tools they need to become virtuous people? Will they have any sense of how anything they learn in college relates to God?

The students who attended the early 19^th-century New England liberal arts colleges had the educational framework to answer those questions, but I’m not so sure that many students today (outside of a few Christian college circles) can do so. For too many college students, the curriculum has become too fragmented, too individualistic, too utilitarian, and too devoid of any overarching truth claims to be able to provide satisfactory answers to such questions.

But regardless of what their college curriculum addresses, individual students today can still make the choice to transcend the demands of their particular areas of study and seek answers to the larger questions. Like 19^th-century students, they can decide that college is about more than merely learning how to write and process information – as essential as those skills are. In the process of learning those skills, they can also take a cue from their late 19^th-century counterparts and cultivate an ethic of civicmindedness and service to their community. That might mean cultivating respect for democratic institutions, developing a willingness to sacrifice one’s own preferences for the good of others, and – what seems to be in especially short supply in our polarized political age – learning how to listen well to others and respect those who hold differing political views.

But today’s college students can also learn from the students of the early 19^th century that there is something even more important than perpetuating American democracy. They can learn that no college education is complete unless it trains students to ask the right questions about the relationship between their empirically based studies of the world around them and larger transcendent principles – including principles about God, the meaning of virtue, and the basis for objective truth.

If students don’t ask these questions, they’ll likely graduate from college with some excellent skills, but without the framework that equips them for a meaningful life. But if they do ask these questions, they will not only have the tools to see the connections between everything that they have learned but they will also gain the ability to apply that knowledge for something more meaningful than merely a personally enjoyable or financially lucrative career.

Two hundred years ago, nearly every American college student was expected to find answers to these larger questions. Today many do not. But for those who want to gain something more than a set of career skills from their education, perhaps it’s time to consider these questions once again.

The Raised Hand is a project of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers and serves its mission to catalyze and empower thoughtful Christian presence and practice at colleges and universities around the world, in service of the common good. To learn more visit cscmovement.org.