General education requirements.

The term strikes fear into some students. Anger into others. Frustration into some. Most feel relief — at least those who have already met the requirements.

The rationale for GER’s is simple, and necessary. Basically, each student ought to have adequate exposure to a variety of fields for two reasons: 1) each student has the opportunity to be sure of the major that he or she is choosing, and 2) each field, in theory, has some sort of relation to all the others and each student is allowed to experience those connections. For example, learning about economics could give a student adequate knowledge for a sociology major because people in that field study the effects of income differences.

Emphasis on “could.” Students could see those connections.

But the other side of GER’s is the obvious — every student has to take them.

And here’s where the issues of class sizes, faculty pay and available sections becomes the harshest of realities.

Each student has to take an English class, for example. So if a student goes online and clicks on English courses they will immediately be greeted by an onslaught of ENG101 sections — 118 to be exact.

But seniors, especially in their final semester, sometimes have a GER class or two left. And they can’t always get into them, which has two horrible consequences: the student cannot walk with their department and is also stuck taking another class during the summer.

Sure, seniors have priority when registering for classes and ought to be able to get into them. But this doesn’t always work. Here’s an example.

Johnny Wolfpack needs a history class to graduate. He finds one that he is remotely interested in and works with the rest of his schedule. He signs up and waitlists it and is the first one to do so. Not a bad chance to take it, given students drop classes all the time because of other circumstances. But he is not so lucky and the waitlist is dropped. Now he does not have a history class. He visits professors of classes that will meet the requirement along with the department head and no one will allow him in.

Should he stay another semester?

If you answered yes, you deserve to be at Carolina.

This problem can easily be avoided on two simple grounds.

Since the University requires the classes, the University should also ensure their availability with no time punishment on the student.

Second, in GER classes, there should be a certain percentage of each class reserved for juniors and seniors.

We all know that class sections aren’t as available as we’d like them to be; neither are class sizes or faculty salary always ideal. But with the way things are, professors ought to be sympathetic to the situation and be willing to teach a few more per class.