Is college too easy?

Most college students would be inclined to respond to that question with a resounding, “No!” Yet critics today argue that colleges aren’t adequately preparing students for the challenges that await them following graduation. They claim that colleges are catering too much to student tastes and requiring too few mandatory core courses.

Jeffrey Wallin, president of the American Academy for Liberal Education, is one of the harshest critics of the current system, claiming that too many of today’s college grads head into the world without “simple, everyday competence,” Wallin said in a USA Weekend article.

Wallin apparently has some backing. A 1993 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics showed that half of every 5,000 college students could not read or interpret a simple bus schedule. By Ames standards, that means 12,500 of Iowa State’s 25,000 students will hop aboard Cy-Ride’s brown route today expecting to end up at North Grand Mall.

Too bad the brown route doesn’t go to the mall.

A different survey conducted this year found that 84 percent of college seniors couldn’t say who was president at the start of the Korean War (Harry S. Truman), and only 8 percent knew the source of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” (Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address).

Wallin told USA Weekend that he blames these deficiencies on the shrinking core curriculums at universities. The number of general education requirements students must fulfill has dropped considerably since the 1960s. In addition, Wallin claims that the courses universities have stopped requiring over the years are those that were the toughest.

He says that only one in three of the top 50 colleges in the U.S. require courses in the natural sciences — physics, biology, and chemistry. Four out of five of those colleges don’t require mathematics, literature, or history, he says.

What about ISU? Is the university providing students with an education that adequately prepares them for the real world? Officials here think so.

“I take pride in the academic standards at ISU. I believe Iowa State is a very rigorous university and our academic standards are high,” ISU President Martin Jischke said.

While Jischke doesn’t agree with Jeffrey Wallin’s accusation that colleges aren’t tough enough, he is concerned about general education requirements.

“I have some concerns about the extent to which students are receiving a good, strong general education,” Jischke said. “We are working with the provost and the Faculty Senate to look at various aspects of the experience students have at ISU and improve that experience.”

The president had examples. In the past few years, ISU has improved the teaching of freshman English by introducing writing labs, improved freshman chemistry courses by working in cooperation with community colleges around the state, revamped freshman biology courses, and started using the World Wide Web to enable more students access to the university, Jischke said.

Jischke points to these changes as evidence of ISU’s commitment to providing students with a solid general education.

Beverly Kruempel, ISU’s Faculty Senate academic affairs chairperson, also takes issue with Jeffrey Wallin’s criticisms of today’s general education requirements. “I don’t think you can make assumptions about requirements for every college and major,” she said. “For some majors a core curriculum is fine, for others it’s difficult to establish a core.”

Kruempel disagrees with Wallin’s definition of a general education. “We need to teach things like responsibility, communication skills, interpersonal skills, and ethics,” she said. “We need to integrate these things into the curriculum, even in technical fields. A good college education isn’t just easy or hard, it’s what a person has gained that prepares them for living.”

While Wallin is advocating a return to a more traditional core curriculum, ISU has been making an effort to expand its educational offerings. The changing expectations of employers have in turn changed the way universities structure their programs. Employers now want more specialized skills.

Edwin Lewis, associate provost, thinks Wallin’s views are too simplistic. “These are very complex issues because higher education is a complex enterprise,” he said.

Lewis emphasizes the changing needs of the educational community. “Wallin’s view is one that would probably restrict higher education to a much narrower range of students and objectives,” he said.

On the other hand, Lewis is sympathetic to the notion that people need broad skills like math, science and literature. “Those skills are what people think of as the basic knowledge of a liberal education,” Lewis said. “They’re what differentiate[s] a university from a trade school.”

Wallin’s criticisms are not new. university officials across the county have grappled with them each time requirements are reviewed. “Planning curriculum is a very complex process,” Kruempel said. “It’s based on what the faculty sees as important, what society considers important and what employers are looking for.”

On the whole, ISU officials said they feel Wallin’s criticisms are not valid here. “ISU has a reputation for having a strong curriculum,” Kruempel said.