Changes made to general education requirements

SUNY Geneseo has been in the process of changing the general education curriculum to include less credits and classes that fit into broader skill areas. Students will be allowed to pick between the old and new curricula starting in the Fall 2022 semester.  

Melanie Blood, ​​Associate Provost for Assessment and Curriculum at Geneseo, explained the changes to the general education requirements. 

Blood said, “Under the new curriculum, we're focusing on knowledge and skill areas rather than a checklist of divisions and departments that you need to take courses from. The idea is that, in these introductory general education courses, we develop foundational skills in areas like communication and in scientific knowledge, and then we apply these different disciplines from the liberal arts to contemporary global challenges. Students are not going to see a lot of new courses; we are simply tagging courses to fit into new curricular areas.”

In addition, there is also an entirely new credit requirement that will be introduced as part of the new general education curriculum according to Blood.  

“There’s also a third requirement besides completing the general education and completing a major, and that’s an integrative and applied learning experience, which is entirely new. The integrative and applied learning experience is intended to take methodologies and specific knowledge gathered in an academic context and apply it either to other academic contexts or to specific work, volunteer and life experiences.” 

According to Blood, the Office of the Dean of Academic Planning and Advisement (DAPA) has been making information on the changes available before the implementation of these changes at the beginning of the Fall 2022 semester. 

“We have been putting information out on the DAPA site, the registrar website and we're working on the [general education] site itself, adding information that will be useful to faculty advisors and students in the transition from one curriculum to the next. We are trying to get the word out through materials on all three of the websites,” she said. 

The new general education curriculum will be applied to new students, but continuing students will have the option to either finish the old curriculum or switch to the new curriculum. 

Blood said, “For continuing students for whom [the new curriculum] is not in their best interest, we're going to reduce the natural sciences by one, instead of two social sciences you’ll take one and instead of two fine arts you’ll take one. We're developing how to do that [for continuing students]. What we would recommend is that all continuing students go into DegreeWorks and do a ‘what if’ analysis to see if it makes more sense for you to decide to do the new curriculum, or whether it makes more sense to complete the old curriculum with the reduced number of credits.”

According to Blood, all students, incoming and continuing, will take a reduced number of general education credits as a result of these changes. 

“Just last week, the senate endorsed a proposal to reduce the current general education requirement by 10 credits for continuing students. All students will have to do 30 credits; that's a statewide requirement for a bachelor's degree so we can't reduce it more than that. However, we are reducing from essentially 45 to 35,” she said

Joe Cope, Interim Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs explained the reasoning behind the revision of the general education requirements. 

Cope said, “I think part of it is that curricular development always happens at colleges. It's just part of the lifecycle of colleges to develop new programs. I think in our case, what's exciting about the curricular developments that have happened is that many of them are interdisciplinary, so they really reflect the fact that some of the work that students are interested in doing crosses that traditional departmental and disciplinary lines.”

While she acknowledges that students might be intimidated by the new curriculum changes, it will not affect their ability to graduate or make the general education requirements difficult to complete.

“We've taken as a guiding principle that no student will be harmed in the transition. Nobody will need to take an extra semester or extra classes whether they're a continuing student or an incoming student. Nobody is going to have a harder time completing their graduation requirements because of this transition. Everyone has taken that as a guiding principle, and I hope that gives students hope.”