Classifying higher education institutions by their general education requirements

Abstract

General Education (GE) curricula specify requirements, most often fulfilled through coursework, that undergraduate students need to satisfy in addition to and often preceding a specialized major or program. Due to the decentralized nature of the American higher education system and lack of national requirements or guidelines, however, GE requirements vary from one institution to another. This exploratory study investigates patterns of GE requirements among a selection of 154 institutions and determines whether and how institutions could be grouped or classified by their GE requirements. Our five-dimension typology is parsimonious and meaningfully distinguishes between GE patterns giving us insightful information about the values and goals of institutions that are not communicated through our traditional categorizations.