Long ago in a universe far, far away, some scholar thought he had a brilliant idea. He thought college students would benefit more from a “well-rounded” education than from an education centered primarily around their desired careers. He decided students should take 140 hours worth of general education courses (GECs), and only 50 hours of classes designed to improve their skills in their major area of study.

I’m sure this man’s picture is hanging on the wall of every university’s board of trustees office around the country. This man is why they have their jobs.

What most people don’t know is the original name he gave these general courses was not GECs, but UCGCUs – Useless Classes that Generate Capital for the University.

And that is basically all they’re good for.

No one wants to sit through an art history class for an entire quarter. If I want to know about art history, I’ll ask my friend – the Internet – about it, and he will give me a better answer than a professor standing in front of 200 students paying $600 apiece to sleep through slides of the Impressionist period.

Some other classes in the same boat are comparative studies, psychology, theater, any science class and economics. I’ve dropped Econ 200 more times than we’ve tried to assassinate Saddam Hussein, and it will be a cold day in you-know-where if anyone ever asks me for the chemical weight of Boron while I’m at a job interview.

Leave GECs in high school where they belong.

GECs do four things for students. First, they make us lose our interest in learning. By the time most people get well into their majors, they’re so burnt out on trying to learn useless information that they half-attempt the rest of their major classes.

Second, GECs lower student’s GPAs. I’d be willing to bet at least 70 percent of students at OSU have better GPAs in their major than overall GPAs. Why? It’s not because students don’t care, it’s because you can only force a person to learn so many trivia questions before they give up. And unless I’m mistaken, “Jeopardy” has only been on campus once in the last 15 years.

Third and fourth, GECs completely destroy a person’s schedule and cause many people to spend an extra year or two at school. It’s almost as hard for a freshman or sophmore to get into a popular GEC as it is for a senior trying to get in an upper-evel finance class. But hey, the longer a person can’t get into a class, the longer they’re enrolled (and the longer the university keeps getting paid).

If the university wants to keep flexing its muscles and requiring us to take certain classes, why not make us take classes we could actually use? Learning about new technology, law, how to finance a loan for a house or how to choose an insurance provider seems much more logical than learning about the cognitive dissonance theory, opportunity cost or what some author’s motivation was in writing a book published 200 years before I was born.

I’m 22 years old. I know what’s best for me. A room full of university employees deciding on a curriculum designed to give someone a headache does not. There are a few other people beside myself whom I trust to have my best interest in mind when making a decision about what I should and should not do. They’re my mom and dad, and last time I checked, they didn’t work for the university.

If the university really wanted to help students prepare for the “real world,” they would develop a university-wide program for students to get two years of hands-on experience in their chosen fields. I’m sure two years of work experience would be more likely to help someone land their first job, as opposed to two years of calculus homework and research papers.

“Congratulations! You correctly cited your Internet source using MLA style, and you told me the necessary force needed to move a 500-kilogram rock. When can you start?”

Yeah right.

No one needs this information to succeed in life. Even Alex Trebek uses cue cards.

Eri Bussa is a senior in agricultural communications. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].