Designing a New GE
BYU faculty excel in teaching general education courses to the benefit of our students, but it has been almost 50 years since the last major revision of the program. BYU General Education has become encumbered with rules and workarounds so numerous that for many students (and faculty) it has become difficult to navigate. Assessment and survey data reveal that how the GE program is currently organized makes it hard for students to understand its mission and goals. We are redesigning the BYU General Education program because we can do better as we enter the second half of BYU’s second century.
Over the last five decades, the BYU GE Program has made important improvements, but it has also been limited in its ability to meet changing demands of the institution and ideas about the role of higher education. Furthermore, because GE’s program objectives predate current assessment requirements, the program lacks the ability to properly self-evaluate and improve its own certified courses. GE certifications increasingly serve the departmental programs, limiting the breadth of the program as specified in the BYU Aims.
UNIV 101: BYU Foundations for Student Success became a general education requirement for all incoming first-year students starting in winter 2024. It is the beginning but certainly not the end of anticipated changes. The discussions about a new GE program are on-going, and our goal in designing GE is to create a program that reflects BYU’s distinctive identity, global perspective, and commitment to a broad university education.
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