In the present day, it is increasingly more difficult to get a college education. High performance at high school is required if the person is willing to enter a higher education institution and receive a scholarship. Moreover, it is necessary to maintain academic success at the same level during the whole period of higher education, so that the study remains free of charge. One of the major challenges students need to meet is excessive, not always justified, course requirements in colleges and universities, which have Bachelor’s programs, which can be solved by extending the length of the Bachelor’s program to five years and giving students more freedom in managing their workload.
The first aspect of excessive requirements is the difficult, time and energy-consuming courses that students need to pass. Such courses normally involve several midterm assignments, papers, and various tests, administered practically at each lesson. Such a curriculum might be helpful when students take two-five courses per trimester, but when the number of disciplines one is studying within three-six months exceeds nine, the learner’s work/life balance is negatively affected. As the student feels stuck because of countless assignments and excessive university hours, they cannot involve in social life, meet their relatives, friends, and parents, or do sports. As Rich’s study suggests, this results in the pervasive feelings of loneliness and isolation as well as in the deterioration of health (Rich, p. 15).
Secondly, among the excessive course requirements, it is possible to distinguish unnecessary hours which students must dedicate to studying a certain subject. For instance, several courses imply quite stringent attendance rules, which prescribe that lectures and seminars be visited, given that the examination contains the information from the lectures (O’Brien, p.6). This means, for instance, students pass an exam not actually in psychology, but rather in their instructor’s perspective on psychological theories. Thus, whereas lectures are normally declared as optional, i.e. students ostensibly have an opportunity to choose whether to attend them, it appears that missing lectures might result in the loss of the desired grade. It needs to be noted that third-fourth year students are also interested in applying their newly gained skills in practice and need to combine education with work to earn their living, so spending additional hours in the classroom has a destructive effect on their health, so they feel like racers in a long survival heat. As a result, they faint in the classroom and sleep in the library, because it is barely possible to remain fit after spending 6 hours in the educational institution, 6- at work and 2 – in the library, working on home assignments. Nowadays, colleges pay great attention to attendance issues, so that even a minor illness can prevent the learner from being evaluated properly, as missing classes leads to the deduction of several points from the grade, which cannot be fully re-gained even if the student prepares the assignment they missed.
Active participation is also among the key requirements most instructors set. In particular, to receive a positive assessment, it is necessary to conduct extensive research for each class so that it is possible to join the discussion and answer the professor’s questions. Shy students or those learners who missed the previous lesson because of disease might automatically be excluded from the discussion, so it turns out that students are evaluated by their health state and personality features. The practice of stressing the importance of participation thus contravenes the principles of equal opportunity and non-discrimination.
The major cause of excessive requirements is the growing demand for professional, well-educated, and skillful specialists in the labor market as well as the complicated competition among businesses for their target consumers. Contemporary employers need active, intelligent people with comprehensive education, who will need minimum additional training, so responding to this challenge, educators try to fit everything an effective job market participant should be familiar with into the four-year Bachelor’s program.
Thus, because excessive course requirements are matched with the high requirements of the job market, one can assume that the most appropriate way of keeping education at a high level is extending the temporal frames of the Bachelor’s program without raising substantially the tuition fee. It needs to be noted that in some professional areas like Medicine and Law, there already exists a practice of extending the period of Bachelor’s training. It would be useful to reapply this practice in the other areas, from Liberal Arts to Engineering. There already exists an opportunity to postpone the defense of Bachelor’s diploma or certain courses to the next year, but it is associated with several problems: 1) students who make their education longer, need to pay additional fees for re-taking courses or lose their scholarship as they are not able to meet curriculum requirements; 2) In the student environment, such learners are treated as “outsiders” and are prone to discrimination. Therefore, it would be appropriate to change the temporal orientation of the Bachelor’s program and adopt the uniform five-year curriculum.
In the first year, general disciplines will be studied. In particular, students will be familiarized with the basics of economics, language, history, psychology, and other areas which comprise the general requirements for all specialties. All courses will be adjusted to the student’s major, e.g. if the future sociologist takes higher mathematics, the course program should be easier for understanding as compared to higher math, taught to programmers.
During the second year of education, students receive an induction to their future profession and continue to take general courses. At this stage, they might be offered some basic introductory professional practice, which will be broadened in terms of scope and involvement in the subsequent year. In the third year, students will also learn the research methodology of their major as well as their minor. The fourth and the fifth years of education should imply lower academic workload and more individual work, which will not imply high attendance and require staying in the college for the whole day. In these years, learners should also get a chance to make up for the missing credits, i.e. take the courses of choice and re-take the courses they failed. This additional year will make education more flexible so that managing personal involvement in the study. The extension of the program will also give more time for choosing the narrow areas of interest within the major and minor specialties to write the most important research papers on.
The problem of excessive course requirements cannot be fully removed, since they reflect the high standards of the profession, but it is possible to mitigate this major challenge to academic achievement by decreasing the number of courses taken in one year. Five-year Bachelor’s programs will partly eliminate the negative effects of excessive academic requirements, such as the uneven ratio between work, study, and leisure and poor health outcomes.
Works cited
- Dochartaigh, N. The Internet Research Handbook: A Practical Guide for Students and Researchers in the Social Sciences. SAGE, 2002.
- Rich, G. Role Overload Among Undergraduate College Students. Bowling Green State University, 2007.
- O’Brien, R. “Students Discuss Curriculum”. The Harvard Crimson, 2004, p.6