Rose Bialk/The Mossy Log
At least once a week, I find myself having a conversation in which my friends and I express frustration with our classes. When reflecting on these repeated discussions, I wonder why we are dissatisfied with classes that we chose to enroll in. However, I then remember that as freshmen — regardless of major or previous education level — we are required to participate in the first-year seminar, better known as CORE.
Lewis & Clark is not unique in this aspect. Most liberal arts colleges have a list of required courses that provide foundational skills for all students and enrich their knowledge in a wider variety of fields than other colleges. These courses are known as fulfilling general education requirements, and at LC two of the courses required specifically for freshmen are CORE classes. They are described on the school’s website as having been “designed to help you develop the reading, writing, discussion, and analytical skills you will need to succeed in college and for life.” The Words CORE class focuses on interpreting texts, while the Numbers class focuses on interpreting quantitative information and models. These are all necessary and valuable skills that college students need, so it might be confusing to find out that some students still find CORE classes lacking in value.
Since starting college, I have learned that every single course you take matters in the grand scheme of your degree; whether you graduate with a certain major or minor, or if you end up having to take extra classes to complete college in four years. Despite this, when it comes to CORE classes (as valuable as they are) they do not count towards the credit needed for a specific major or minor. This is opposed to any other general education classes that you will be taking throughout your college journey.
Let us say you want to major in English, and you are taking Rachel Cole’s CORE, a course titled The Greatest American Novels. Though this is a literature class taught by a professor of the English department, this class will not supply any credits towards an English major. This unnecessary technical issue with CORE classes is a source of many students’ frustrations with the program.
That is not to say that the content of these classes is not important. In fact, I learned more from my Numbers class than many of my other classes here; I still reference its course material in conversations. However, what I learned from this class will only be reflected in my course credits and degree as completing my first-year CORE credits.
Personally, I am not a big fan of numbers — I still get traumatic trigonometry flashbacks every time I listen to Charli xcx’s “360.” Nevertheless, my Numbers class, which focused on statistics, taught me critical skills that I continue to use every time I need to analyze data. An essential aspect of a liberal arts education is that it recognizes the importance of learning from outside your field, especially at the foundational level that CORE classes cover.
While the purpose of CORE classes is to teach you skills that are important for every area of study — that is, the interpretation and analysis of written or quantifiable data — they are not limited to this purpose and often delve into their own specific topics. For instance, Nancy Gallman’s People, Paleography, and the Past is essentially a history class, while Todd Lochner’s Conceptions of Justice focuses on an essential area of study in political science.
If CORE classes counted for major credits, it would open up possibilities for students to explore different major programs early in their college career, fulfilling a general education requirement without taking up a time slot that could have been used for an intro class otherwise. Additionally, by completing major credits earlier, students could have more extracurricular availability later in their college years to explore different disciplines from a more developed lens.
Another thing students would benefit from is being able to take these courses at any class standing, rather than solely to fulfill a first-year requirement. I sometimes wistfully think about how I can never take Andrea Hibbard’s Why Write? class. As an English major who asks myself the question “why write?” every time I have to edit another essay for Lyell Asher, this class would certainly benefit me. Alas, I can no longer enroll in it, as I have already fulfilled my CORE requirement.
But class content is not the only issue students face — if you ever want to transfer to a different college, those credits will most likely not easily transfer with you. They could be used to fulfill first-year seminar requirements, but that depends on if the college you are transferring to has any.
All that is not to call for the abolition of CORE classes. Rather, it is to call for a reform of the idea of first-year seminars so that while the courses and their content remain the same, they would also fall under their respective major, rather than the CORE category. This change would help enforce the significance of CORE classes beyond a requirement and make them meaningful toward the one quantifiable thing that matters to society after college: your degree.
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