Emory University announced a new set of general education requirements (GERs), dubbed the Blue GER Plan, on March 14 in an email sent to all undergraduate students. The Blue plan will go into effect in fall 2023 for all incoming students, including both first-year and transfer students, and will require students to complete 15 courses in five categories. Currently, students are expected to take 18 courses across 10 areas.
The new GERs were approved by Emory faculty in fall 2021 after a “multi-year effort of thinking,” according to Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Faculty Partnerships Jason Ciejka (11G, 17L).
“That initiative crossed the undergraduate schools at Emory,” Ciejka said. “So, there were representatives of the College faculty, but also representatives from Oxford, business, nursing.”
Existing GERs are labeled as the Gold GER Plan, which current Emory students will still follow. According to Ciejka, students can use both old and new GERs under the same category to satisfy existing requirements. For example, the old “Math & Quantitative Reasoning” area for the Gold GERs can be fulfilled through “Math & Quantitative Reasoning” courses or through courses under the new “Quantitative Reasoning” subcategory in the Blue plan.
However, Gold GER courses cannot be used to fulfill the Blue GER plan.
The first Blue GER category is “Success at Emory,” which consists of all courses students are required to complete in their first year: “Emory Edge” (ECS 101), “It’s Your Health & Wellbeing” (HLTH 100) and one physical education (PE) course. Students must take ECS 101 and HLTH 100 in their first semester, but can choose to take PE in either the fall or the spring.
“They need to complete those requirements in their first year,” Ciejka said. “They're really providing a foundation for the students to succeed over their four years at Emory.”
The second category is “Exploration Courses,” where students will be introduced to the “broad areas of human learning and inquiry,” according to Ciejka. This will include one humanities and arts course, one social science course, one natural science course and one quantitative reasoning course. Students are expected to complete this category by the end of their second year.
“Expression & Communication,” the third category of the Blue plan, includes one first-year communication course, one first-year seminar and two continued communication courses. Ciejka said that this category is an “evolution” of existing continuous writing courses, but requires more than one genre of communication.
“In the past continuing writing requirements, students had to do at least 20 pages of polished writing,” Ciejka said. “Under the new requirement, students will be expected, maybe to do writing of an essay, but also present. They might be doing other kinds of communication assignments as well, perhaps writing exhibition labels for an exhibition, or a catalog for that or creating a website or digital material to go with an exhibition.”
The fourth category is “Belonging and Community,” which includes one race and ethnicity and two intercultural communication courses. Students must complete this category by the end of their third year of college.
The last category, “Experience and Application,” requires students to take a course or complete an approved non-credit experience that allows them to apply knowledge gained in their Emory coursework to practical and real-world situations. Ciejka also stressed the flexibility built into this category.
“If there's not a course that they want to use, but there is some kind of experience that's not associated with the course at Emory, they can petition in advance to potentially count that experience towards the ‘Experience and Application’ GER,” Ciejka said.
When discussing the philosophy behind the new GERs, Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Joanne Brzinski said the University chose to “frontload” some of the GERs, such as the “Exploration Courses,” so help students understand the “breadth” of Emory’s curriculum and what is available to them at the earlier stages of deciding on majors.
“About 50% of our graduating seniors are taking at least one requirement that we would think of as a breadth requirement in their last semester, and so that doesn’t make any sense,” Brzinski said.
Incoming College Council President Neha Murthy (24C) added that the new GERs help ensure students of different majors are taking different courses at the beginning of their college life, citing her personal experience as supporting evidence.
“I think one of the points of the general education, or the change at least in the general education requirements, is to ensure that humanities majors aren't waiting to take their science courses until the very end,” Murthy said. “And then vice versa — STEM majors not waiting until the end to do their language or humanities courses.”
Oxford College Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Valerie Molyneaux added that ensuring all students have common academic experiences is another goal for the new GER requirements.
“The change to fewer GERs but ones that everybody needs to move through while at Emory, be that Atlanta campus or Oxford, we hope makes it a more equitable experience for all our students,” Molyneaux said.
Additionally, AP credits should be for “acceleration purposes,” not for general education purposes, Molyneaux noted, explaining that a student with an AP biology credit could move past “Foundations of Modern Biol I” (BIOL 141) and instead start their coursework at “Foundations of Modern Biol II” (BIOL 142), but could no longer score out of taking the GER completely. She added that some students miss the opportunity to learn topics at a university level with college-level faculty and instructors after using AP or IB credit.
However, the first-year communication course and one intercultural communication course can still be fulfilled by AP, IB or other appropriate test credits.
Molyneaux said that GERs are a way to think about the world, rather than a checklist, which is how she believes most Emory students view GERs.
“We really like the idea that students are learning multiple ways of understanding the world before they choose one thing to specialize in,” Molyneaux said. “I know it's nerdy, but we believe in a general education.”
Emily Zhou (23Ox) said learning classes across multiple subjects has “tremendous value.”
“Even though I am an economics and environmental science major — so math and science — I've also gotten the opportunity to take classes like ethics, philosophy, anthropology, which are classes I might not have taken if not for the gen ed requirements, but I ended up really enjoying,” Zhou said.
Zhou, who intends to double major and graduate in three and a half years, said that she feels Emory could reduce the number of GERs even further. She added that the requirements put a significant strain on students’ schedules.
“Having a lower quantity of requirements would also allow students to be more flexible with their major,” Zhou said. “Perhaps they change paths, and they're at the end of their sophomore year. If a student wanted to do that, they shouldn't be disadvantaged because of the heavy burden of Gen Ed Requirements.”
Despite the above changes, Emory retained PE requirements, which goes against a national trend of colleges mandating PE courses. Roughly 32% of U.S. colleges and Universities require a PE course to graduate, a percentage that has declined by 7% since 2010, according to an Oregon State University study.
Currently, many of Emory’s peer institutions’ undergraduate GERs do not mandate a PE requirement, including the University of Notre Dame (Ind.), Northwestern University (Ill.), Vanderbilt University (Tenn.), University of Chicago and Duke University (N.C.).
However, undergraduate students at Case Western Reserve University (Ohio), Cornell University (N.Y.) and Rice University (Texas) are required to take some form of PE.
Zhou said that, while she understands the thought process of retaining the PE requirement to keep students physically active and healthy, she feels that it is an extra addition on students’ schedules.
“In practice, I don't feel that the PE requirements actually add that much to a student's physical health,” Zhou said. “Oftentimes, it really just adds this extra three hour burden on a student's schedule.”
Murthy shared different views on the value of PE requirements, emphasizing the importance of physical education in higher-education institutions.
“I actually do like the PE requirements just because I feel like, especially in high level universities, like Emory, which is so intense and academic, I find myself so involved in academics and extracurriculars,” Murthy said. “… But I think it is really important to foster that, being active, even if it's like one semester.”
Brzinski cited Emory’s commitment to the “idea of well being and health for life” as the reason for keeping the PE requirement, noting that the University did discuss the possibility of dropping the requirement.
“There was actually really compelling information that was presented by the faculty in physical education and in health about the importance for students in physical well being,” Brzinski said. “This actually helps you do well academically, to be physically well.”
Molyneaux added that even though Emory did not change the PE requirement, the content of the PE courses have changed over the years.
“We've tried to focus, at least at Oxford, our PE offerings to what students have told us they want, that moment for reflection, that reminder to breathe,” Molyneaux said.
