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Every university has General Education requirements. Accreditors want to ensure undergraduates leave college a fully “educated” person. Historically, many students have seen such requirements as disjointed, if not burdensome: largely proscribed, dispersed across the disciplinary nooks and crannies of the catalog, and comprising far too much of their coursework. Plymouth State’s Cluster Learning Model has changed all that by spurring innovation in the field of General Education.

Until recently, the Panther experience largely mirrored much of the nation’s “distributive” approach. Our first GenEd program had students mainly choose from three broad liberal arts areas. In 1985, we honed-in on these and asked students to take a dozen-plus courses. But defining GenEd by major-specific courses that could “double” count in the discipline and GenEd resulted in a large program accounting for nearly half of the courses required for a baccalaureate degree.

In 2005, Plymouth State launched a more student-centered GenEd curriculum. It has greater interdisciplinary choice and focused on eight semi-tangible skills, including “working with technology.” Replacing a sampling of disciplinary content with skills conformed to a larger national shift, which Paul Hanstedt, a leading scholar of GenEd, called a move from the “original” GenEd of the 1960s to “GenEd 2.0.” With the arrival of President Birx in 2015, however, Plymouth State began setting the national trend and now we are shapers of “GenEd 3.0.”