Journeys to a Princeton diploma are manifold. In fact, they are so varied that they completely lack a coherent guiding message or principal intellectual basis. Our education is the sum of the classes we take, yet there is no support in its construction beyond our major requirements and a demand to take a suitably broad range of courses through the unfocused general education requirements. With no perspective offered on the knowledge or ideas that make someone educated, the University abandons a crucial task in its mission.
To better guide students through intellectual growth that is meaningful and results in deep knowledge, Princeton must offer more structure. A more restrictive gen-ed requirement program, comprising only a few specially designed courses, could ensure that diverse intellectual tools are coherently, successfully, and meaningfully imparted. With more institutionalized pathways — be they internal department tracks or pre-major sequences studying a particular time, place, or knowledge base — students might actually gain specialized knowledge instead of simply pursuing more breadth.
Some of these options already exist: in the politics department, for example, students can follow a track to focus their studies. Underclassmen can take a humanities sequence to humanistic inquiry in a particular culture, or the Integrated Science Curriculum to study life sciences multiple disciplines. But many majors do not offer ways to carve a specific path through their discipline, and few underclassmen are well-prepared to plot their course of study: something the University knows well. A decisive course plan is not necessary nor expected — my first year, it was advertised that 56 percent of A.B. students and 40 percent of B.S.E. students change from the major on their application.
When it is time to build an academic program, we are told to choose classes with content that “engages your imagination and expands your educational horizons” or to take a course because it “sparks your interest,” all while balancing distribution requirements and required classes for one’s major. This leads to both a somewhat unmanageable bevy of options — usually a course catalog will spark interest in more courses than can fit in one semester — and an intimidating set of restrictions, particularly when underclassmen juggle the prerequisites for multiple majors. There’s an overwhelming amount of ways to spend course credits.
This might make it seem like you can’t go wrong: if there are so many options, a fulfilling schedule is bound to form. But a random hodgepodge of classes does not a good education make. It’s one of the reasons colleges have majors. We choose departments because we recognize that cultivating deep understanding is necessary for rigorous intellectual inquiry. Presuming that classes taken outside one’s major should have an educational purpose that extends beyond simply finding that major, it seems essential to build a curriculum that does not simply revolve around exploring to the widest possible extent.
But the University does not help students curate a meaningful collection of classes, instead prioritizing breadth and diversity of experience and thus leaving a vacuum of centralized advice. It’s up to students and their advisors to cobble together a useful education. To understand how this process can occur, I reached out to four professors in different disciplines who advise underclassmen, asking their advice on how to craft a good curriculum. Three of them — one in each the history, chemistry, and computer science departments — told me that their guidance was calibrated to the individual students they worked with, making it impossible to share anything beyond the already-given generalities.
Absent a self-generated or University-dictated perspective on education, students are indeed reliant on their advisors to guide them through their education. But this is worrying, because the advising system here is not very good. There’s very little continuity — I’ve had a different advisor each year of undergrad — and there are few opportunities for a deep relationship to form between mentor and mentee. You may never take a class with your advisor or meet them more than once a semester. Thus, there is no guarantee that students will actually receive support that helps them construct a personalized education that is excellent — the education for which Princeton allegedly strives.
Indeed, it’s too easy to leave Princeton without the transcendent liberal arts education that the University extols when the only intellectual guidance comes in the form of general platitudes and an inconstant and inadequate advising system. Helpfully, Shilo Brooks, Executive Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and Lecturer in the Department of Politics, shared one such perspective on a universal educational goal with me.
“My view is that students should make sure to take at least a few courses that will put them into conversation with the most profound thinkers, writers, and artists in human history,” he wrote. Education, expressed here, has a purpose: not only to come into contact with many different types of knowledge, but to learn things that matter to leading a meaningful life.
“You are [a] human being, and your task is to martial [sic] the resources of this institution to prepare yourself for the wonderful and terrible fickleness of your life by experiencing for yourself the potential and substance of the kind of being you are,” Brooks wrote.
One way to achieve this vision would be establishing a core curriculum, which can give students “coherent and substantive learning in essential areas of knowledge,” wrote Lynne Cheney when she served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, adding that without one students can only bring a “limited perspective to enduring human questions.” This model of education is no longer upheld, and there are many good reasons for that: students can dive deeper into fields in which they are passionate, and there are more opportunities to support and investigate new fields of study and areas of research.
But in its absence, there’s been an abdication of responsibility on the part of education leaders; no longer are students supposed to simply learn, but they’re also supposed to know what, how, and why to do so. We are taught to research, but not to accumulate knowledge that can support serious intellectual inquiry or to construct a coherent worldview. Depth and breadth are not mutually exclusive, but the former has been completely abandoned in favor of the latter.
Students come to Princeton University to be educated. A good education consists of more than just a collection of interesting classes, and the University knows this. Instead of letting students bumble around trying to happen upon one, it should standardize pathways, programs, tracks, and truly impactful advising systems that ensure such an education is imparted. I’m only a student myself, so far be it from me to suggest that I know precisely what I — and my peers — need to study. The question of what constitutes a good education is complex and contentious. But it would be nice if someone, somewhere, in this institution, made some attempt to provide that answer.
Abigail Rabieh is a senior in the history department from Cambridge, Mass. She is the public editor at the ‘Prince’ and can be reached via email at arabieh[at]princeton.edu or on X at @AbigailRabieh.
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