The course that no one wants to take

There is a survey that is worth looking at closely.

In 2022, Inside Higher Ed and Hanover Research asked 178 provosts of American universities about their general education programs: that block of common subjects—humanities, critical thinking, writing—that every student must take regardless of their major. Ninety percent answered that this block is a crucial part of any degree. Sixty-five percent said that their faculty teaches it with enthusiasm.

And 32% believed that their students understand what it is for.

Ninety versus thirty-two. That gap does not describe a content problem. It describes a translation problem. The institution knows perfectly well why those subjects are there. The student does not.

The Word That Repeats

Steven Mintz, who has been studying this for years, summarizes what student surveys return: they perceive these subjects as a checklist of tasks to complete, like an obstacle course between them and what they actually came to study. And there is a word that appears over and over again in their responses: irrelevant.

His diagnosis of the dominant model is even harsher. A curriculum made of detached introductory courses, each championing its own discipline, produces the worst of all possible worlds: demotivated students, confusing requirements, and a set of narrow courses that barely touch the real objective of the entire block.

From the American Association of Colleges and Universities, Kate Drezek McConnell explains it with a memorable image: general education has become the lemon of the curriculum. And she adds something that should interest any leadership team: millions are spent on retention programs focused on what happens outside the classroom, while the section of the curriculum that disengages the most students remains untouched.

It is worth highlighting who is saying all this. It is not the students complaining. It is the deans.

Now There Is a New Consequence

For years, the disaffection with this block was a climate issue: half-empty classrooms, long faces, lukewarm evaluations. Annoying, but bearable.

In 2026, it has ceased to be so. The chain of events is short and known to anyone who teaches: a student who does not see the point of an assignment does not do it worse, they delegate it. They ask a machine. The question now being openly asked in the American sector is whether general education is going to die of this, rather than budget cuts.

And there is the serious warning. You can live with a subject that bores. You cannot live with a subject that has become a bureaucratic formality that nobody writes.

The Problem Is Not the Content

This is where the story gets interesting, because proof to the contrary exists.

In 2017, Purdue University—a fundamentally technical institution of engineers and agronomists—launched a program called Cornerstone. Its starting idea was modest and very clever: instead of rewriting the entire general education curriculum, a task that would have taken years of committees, they created a core within the core. A coherent pathway of courses that met the existing requirements, but with direction and a narrative.

It started with about a hundred students.

Today, it exceeds eight thousand a year and is the largest great books program in the United States.

What is remarkable is what they did not do to achieve it. They did not water down the readings: students read Shakespeare and Toni Morrison. They did not make it shorter or easier. They did not disguise it as a practical subject.

They changed other things. They chained the courses into a sequence with a beginning and an end, instead of leaving them loose across the curriculum. They aligned the content with each student's major, so that an engineer could look at their own field through the eyes of a humanist. They brought in more than a hundred faculty members as mentors. And they took the program out of the classroom: theater, exhibitions, dedicated events.

The result had an effect that no one had planned. Professors with twenty years at the institution told the dean that it was the first time they felt they were contributing to a shared university goal, and not just to that of their department.

Eighty times more students. The same readings. The only thing that changed was the format.

The Uncomfortable Question Has a Scientific Answer

There is an objection that every humanities professor has heard in class, usually from the third row: and what is this useful for?

It is usually taken as an impertinence. It turns out to be the variable.

Chris Hulleman and Judith Harackiewicz have spent more than fifteen years studying it with randomized experiments in real classrooms. The design is simple: one group of students is asked to write about how what they are studying connects to their own lives; the control group is asked to summarize the content. Nothing else.

Those in the first group get better grades and develop more interest in the subject. The effect is greater, and this is the important part, on the students who were doing the worst, those who were on the verge of dropping out.

With one documented condition: the connection has to be concrete. Telling a student that the humanities will serve them in life produces no measurable effect. Having them find the precise connection between this text and their life, however, does.

In other words: the "what is this useful for?" is not answered with a welcome speech. It is answered at every stage, or it is not answered at all.

Enhance, Do Not Replace

It is worth being clear on one point, because this is where misunderstandings usually begin.

None of this means that universities that already have a humanities block are doing it wrong. Many do it with excellent people and sound judgment. It means something else: that a faculty, no matter how good, cannot manufacture everything. They cannot bring in the country's best thinkers to speak every week. They cannot sustain a community that remains alive after graduation. They cannot set up on their own an international round table where their students sit with researchers from other countries. Not because they lack talent, but because they lack scale.

That is where an external pathway makes sense. Not to take anyone's place, but to reach where a single institution alone cannot reach, leaving in the hands of the university what only the university can give: the professor who knows the student, who grades them, who asks them in the hallway how they are doing.

The Question to Ask

You do not need a consultancy to know where your institution stands. There is a question that does the work on its own, and the answer is already in the computers of your own academic registrar.

What grade would your students give that subject?

If the answer makes you uncomfortable, it is not a problem with your professors. It is a format problem. And formats, unlike faculties, can be changed.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.