GRE® essay: Universities should require every student to take a variety of courses

[Konstantin]

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Question:
"Universities should require every student to take a variety of courses outside the student's field of study because acquiring knowledge of various academic disciplines is the best way to become truly educated."
Answer:
Whether a person will have become truly educated depends, of course, on his personal aims and efforts. Nevertheless, I tend to agree with the statement that universities should require their students to learn about subjects, non-relating with their majors. I strongly believe in the usefulness of such an approach, because an educated person has to know a few about manifold subjects; this knowledge will help a student to be more successful in his future career and life.

Since a lot of students don’t know what will be really helpful for their future, universities should oblige them to take manifold courses. Some students have preferred not to learn manifold subjects, finding them boring and unfamiliar. Others don’t like such courses, thinking that they are useless for their future career. The latter prefer to concentrate on their majors in order to become leading specialists in the respective areas and sometimes such an approach is right. On the other hand, these narrow specialists are too confined within their small frame to understand global tendencies and to react on them adequately. As the result, a person, who wants to be really educated and successful have to have a broad knowledge.

Truly educated people know a lot about different things and they feel themselves comfortable in any society. Nevertheless, a person could gain knowledge using various techniques: through communication with others, through his own experience or through education at the university. In my opinion, the last way is easiest and gives a lot of positive emotions. A person, who have taken different courses at the university is able to maintain discussion on any subject and could understand more interdependencies in real life. For instance, an engineering student, studying simultaneously the history of arts or law could easily establish a relationship with people, who knows nothing about engineering and could be interesting for them.

Various knowledge, acquiring at the university, helps a student to be more successful in his future life. However, one may argue that a person who known all, actually known nothing. And he would be partially right. But we don’t have to consider this statement as an appeal to learn only about one subjects; it simply states that one has to have one major occupation. Moreover, I observed a lot of situations, where additional, “non-major” knowledge plays a major role in promoting on a new position in the situation of equal primary merits. As an additional argument, I could mention Ivy League’s universities, where such minor courses are widely used.

In sum, I believe that universities should diversify their curriculum in order to create truly educated people. And students have to appreciate these possibilities since they make them more successful in their future lives.

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